The “Freest Writer” in Stalin’s Russia

Laurence Sterne, the eighteenth-century author of Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey, might seem an unlikely figure to capture the imagination of early Soviet intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s. The Bolshevik Revolution dismantled the cultural institutions of the old regime, displaced much of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia, and set out to create a new literary canon for a new Soviet reader. From the outset, literature was subject to political control.By the 1930s, the state increasingly defined a canon of approved literary classics, while the newly-established doctrine of Socialist Realism began to dominate official literary institutions.

What place could there be, in such a system, for an eccentric Yorkshire clergyman whose popularity in Russia had peaked more than a century earlier, at the turn of the nineteenth century? And yet, in the two decades following the 1917 Revolution, Sterne’s name began to appear with notable frequency in lecture halls, private correspondence, diaries, and unpublished manuscripts. Laurence Sterne and His Readers in Early Soviet Russia: The Secret Order of Shandeans traces Sterne’s reappearance in early Soviet culture. Drawing on letters, diaries, translation drafts, marginal notes, illustrations, and editorial correspondences, the book reconstructs how Soviet readers encountered Sterne and what they sought in his writing.

In mid-1920s Leningrad, an undergraduate student Edvarda Kucherova wrote to a friend: “You cannot imagine how much I adore Sterne. In a very personal way and with such gratitude, for he helps me live. Thanks to him, it is so clear that everything that is closest and most desirable is always so far away from us. Sterne taught me to understand and endure this.”

One of Sterne’s most influential early Soviet advocates was Viktor Shklovsky, a literary critic associated with the experimental literary criticism of the 1920s. In a 1921 pamphlet devoted to Tristram Shandy, Shklovsky presented Sterne as a ‘radical revolutionary of form’ whose digressive prose anticipated the poetry of the Russian Futurists and paintings by Picasso. Sterne’s Soviet afterlife, however, was not confined to the avant-garde circles. By the 1930s, as official discourse turned against modernism, Sterne continued to be read, but attention shifted from questions of form to philosophical and psychological concerns. Despite this change, one association remained constant. Sterne was repeatedly linked, whether approvingly or critically, with artistic and inner freedom.

The book takes Sterne as a point of entry into the everyday intellectual life of Soviet translators, critics, and readers. The circulation of works by the ‘freest writer of all times’ (as Friedrich Nietzsche once called Sterne) an author with no obvious utility for the Soviet state, allows the reconstruction of a form of intellectual life that existed alongside, and partly outside, the enforced unanimity of Stalinist culture.

Readers turned to Sterne for many reasons. In 1937, the celebrated Soviet writer Isaac Babel and his wife, Antonina Pirozhkova, consulted A Sentimental Journey while searching for a name for their newborn daughter. Among those drawn to Sterne in the 1930s was Gustav Shpet, one of Russia’s leading philosophers before the Revolution. Excluded from academic philosophy under Soviet rule, Shpet turned to literary translation as a means of both economic and intellectual subsistence. In his notes to an unfinished translation of Tristram Shandy, he read Sterne as a belated Renaissance humanist, an author who sought distance from his own times by immersing himself in older comic traditions. Shpet’s fate, however, underscores the limits of such refuge. Arrested during the Great Terror, he was executed in 1937.

The book follows figures from very different backgrounds. One of them is the Ukrainian critic Stepan Babookh. Before becoming a literary editor, most notably one of the editors of the 1935 Russian edition of A Sentimental Journey, he had been a worker, soldier and Bolshevik activist. Babookh discovered English literature while being held as a POW by the British during the war, first in an internment camp in India and later in a London prison. A self-taught intellectual of the new Soviet generation, he chose to abandon a Party career in order to become a scholar of English literature.

In the late 1930s, Izrail Vertsman, a scholar of Marxist aesthetics, defended the first Soviet doctoral dissertation devoted to Sterne. Vertsman belonged to a group of critics known as “the Current”, led by philosophers Mikhail Lifshitz and Georg Lukács. These intellectuals advocated more sophisticated forms of Marxist criticism, opposing the crude (in their view) sociological approaches of the 1920s. For Vertsman, Sterne embodied the spirit of creative renewal he associated with “the Current”, yet his private letters reveal the difficulty of reconciling his deep admiration of Sterne with the intellectual constraints of the Stalinist 1930s.

Through these intertwined lives, the book reconstructs what it calls the secret order of Shandeans—an imagined community of readers ranging from literary scholars, translators, and high school students to soldiers and Gulag prisoners. For many of them, Sterne’s humour offered an imaginary escape at a time of political uncertainty and mounting restrictions on creative freedom, when public expressions of individuality were becoming increasingly dangerous.

^{Featured image by Alexander Popadin via Pexels.}

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Turn off AI. Pick up a crayon.

Google Gemini offers “a new way to bring your imagination to life.” Adobe Firefly promises “The ultimate creative AI solution.” And Craiyon invites you to “Create AI Art.”

Don’t believe the tech hype. Close the generative AI window. And turn to the book that has sparked creativity for decades: Crockett Johnson’s Harold and the Purple Crayon. Published 70 years ago this fall, it is a manifesto for human creativity disguised as a children’s picture book—a message that’s even more relevant today than it was in 1955.

The opening pages of Harold and the Purple Crayon illustrate why throwing prompts into AI does not create art. Art begins by facing an empty canvas. Maybe you scribble a bit—as Harold does. Only after four pages of zig-zagging experiments does Harold pause and decide to take his line for a walk in the moonlight. Traveling along the line of your imagination requires your full attention. Resist the algorithm’s allure and become an active dreamer.

For Harold, as for most artists, drawing is a form of thinking. After drawing the moon for his walk in the moonlight, Harold makes “a long straight path so he wouldn’t get lost,” but he doesn’t “seem to be getting anywhere on the long straight path.” So, he leaves the path. But he had to create the straight path in order to realize that straight paths lead nowhere interesting. Making art is a process of discovery. Getting lost and making mistakes are part of the process.

A mistake might inspire a new direction or generate the art itself. Harold’s mistakes do both. Frightened by the dragon he has drawn to guard the apple tree, “His hand holding the purple crayon shook.” At this moment, the shaky crayon’s line oscillates between these different possibilities: a wavy scribble, or a series of conjoined cursive w’s, or the surface of an ocean in the visual language of the cartoon. So, as artists do, Harold grapples with uncertainty, and then has a realization: this line must be an ocean. When he recognizes that, the story can continue; Harold draws a boat and launches a several-page nautical voyage.

But AI’s risk-free, frictionless “creativity” launches nothing because friction generates the surprises that create art—the unpredictable results of an imagination in conversation with itself. For young people who may be dazzled by or even encouraged to use AI, let them also be encouraged to take the long road of doing things the “old fashioned” way because in doing these things ourselves, we learn, we grow, and we find our own voice.

It’s true that AI images can surprise us: that sixth finger or phantom arm in a photorealistic portrait of smiling people does make us look again. But art’s surprises emerge from a larger vision. Harold’s triangle-fingered, goggle-eyed policeman is Crockett Johnson gesturing towards the untutored abstractions of children’s art. It’s an intentional shift in the visual style. In contrast, AI’s extra fingers or limbs steer us into the uncanny valley—apt if the image illustrates horror fiction, but not if it’s supposed to represent, say, cheerful coworkers.

Drawing on decades of experience in the visual arts, Johnson’s aesthetic choices suit the story he is telling. Drawing from millions of works that feed its algorithm, AI can only imitate aesthetic choices. It cannot make them. And a statistically probable sentence or image can only gesture broadly towards the subtleties of human perception.

Because AI doesn’t understand why humans make art. Nor do the high-tech hucksters who are promising art without effort.

If you want to resist AI’s lure of frictionless creativity (and trust me, you do), open Harold and the Purple Crayon to experience the excitement of the creative mind at work. Johnson’s tale positions us as witnesses to the moment of artistic creation, watching Harold invent the story that we are reading while we are reading it. Although that’s not literally true, it feels true because the crayon—the embodiment of Harold’s apparent improvisation—is the engine of narrative. The story emerges from the path of a crayon which simultaneously generates and is inspired by the unfolding story.

The book’s ability to dramatize what creativity feels like is one reason it has inspired so many artists. Prince’s favorite childhood book, Harold is why Prince played purple guitars, favored purple fashion, and strongly identified with the color purple. Harold inspired Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Richard Powers to become a writer, and the name of Yale’s improvisational theatre group the Purple Crayon. Upon receiving the Caldecott Medal for Jumanji (1981), the classic picture book that would launch a film franchise, Chris Van Allsburg thanked “Jan Vermeer, for the way he used light; …Federico Fellini, for making films that look the way they do; …and Harold, for his purple crayon.”

Harold and the Purple Crayon has inspired so many because Harold’s journey is a story about what it means to be human—facing our challenges by thinking creatively, transforming problems into solutions, drawing new paths forward. When the scribble becomes an ocean, draw a boat. When it gets dark, draw a moon. To live is to improvise, and artists are our most gifted improvisers.

But developing our creative muscles requires the friction of crayon against paper, of imagination against impediment. If we delegate our dreaming to subcommittees of robots, humans’ unique strength—our capacity to imagine—will wither. If we outsource our creativity, we outsource our humanity.

And that is dangerous. Harold is in greatest peril when he slips from his unfinished mountaintop, stops drawing, and begins falling through space. These three pages mark the longest time that his crayon leaves the page. Put another way: he comes closest to his demise when, mid-adventure, he relinquishes the symbol of his creative mind. He stops thinking.

Then: “But luckily, he kept his wits and his purple crayon.” Harold presses crayon to page, draws a circle, which becomes a hot-air balloon that carries him to safety.

Johnson wrote the book while his own safety was at risk—under FBI surveillance and at risk of losing his livelihood due to McCarthyism. In daring to dream, he temporarily escaped surveillance and created a template for resilient, liberatory imaginations.

In these dangerous times, we might look to Harold’s crayon—or whatever that represents for each of us—and recognize the power of our imaginations. Rather than outsourcing our dreaming to machines, we can instead cultivate our capacity to imagine better futures.

And, come what may, remember what Harold would do: Always keep your wits and your purple crayon.

^{Photo by Dragos Gontariu on Unsplash.}

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What’s your literary classic Halloween costume? [quiz]

This Halloween, why not let literature dress you? The Oxford World’s Classics series has brought together the greatest works of fiction, drama, and poetry, from Gothic horrors to timeless romances. Take this quiz to discover which titles you should use as inspiration for your costume this spooky season!

Explore more titles in with our curated Halloween reading list on Bookshop (US, UK) and Amazon (US, UK).

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Ten American road trips

In the spring of 1791, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, accompanied by Jefferson’s enslaved chef James Hemings, took a road trip. In six weeks, they covered more than 900 miles, travelling through New York, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut before returning across Long Island. Suffering from various physical ailments and exhausted by the political travails of the day, they sought “health, recreation, and curiosity.” Madison said as long as they were together they could “never be out of their way.” Decades later, he recalled that the trip made them “immediate companions.”

Few rites of passage are as venerated in American culture as the road trip, the journey of discovery to places unfamiliar or unknown. Here are ten noteworthy ones in literature and film in chronological order:

1. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)

Mark Twain knew about travel! In his famous novel, we follow Huck and Jim as they stream down the Mississippi in a biracial journey of discovery and escape. The trip gets a bit complicated in the novel’s third act, but, on the journey, they prove their manhood and confess their feelings for one another. Jim discovers he is free and Huck realizes the road is the only place for him. At the end, Huck continues his travels as he lights out for the Territory.

2. It Happened One Night (1934)

In this classic screwball comedy, Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert find themselves together on a bus heading to New York from Florida. They hitchhike and encounter all kinds of difficulties as they fall in love, even though Colbert is married to a charlatan. Of course, they end up together. The film swept the key Academy Awards categories̶—and it did something else. In one scene, Clark Gable takes off his shirt to reveal he is wearing nothing beneath it. As a result, T-shirt sales in America plummeted.

3. The Grapes of Wrath (book 1939; film 1940)

In John Steinbeck’s stirring novel, the Joad family, victims of the dust bowl and ruthless bankers, are forced to flee their Oklahoma home and head to California. They travel along the legendary Route 66, where they experience cruelty and kindness as they make their way to what they think will be the promised land. Unfortunately, it isn’t paradise, and at the end Tom Joad commits himself to forever travelling the country and serving as an agent of justice. “I’ll be everywhere,” he states.

4. On The Road (1957)

Jack Kerouac’s novel is the one everyone thinks of when it comes to road trips. Much of the book focuses on the travels of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty. It is a tale of friendship and discovery, written in a stream of consciousness that matches the improvisational genius of jazz, which is a current that runs through the book. The novel has influenced generations of creative artists. Paradise says it best: “Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.”

5. Travels with Charley: In Search of America (1962)

John Steinbeck makes this list twice. In 1960, aging and feeling that he had lost the feel for America, he embarked on a 10,000-mile journey across the nation, accompanied by his French poodle Charley. Part travelogue, part fiction, he wrote about the people he met. He gloried in the gifts of nature at Yellowstone and agonized over scenes of racial violence in New Orleans. In the end, he was uncertain what he found, and he lamented the loss of an older America. “The more I inspected this American image, the less sure I became of what it is.”

6. Easy Rider (1969)

The film follows Captain America (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper) as they travel by motorcycle from Los Angeles to New Orleans. The pair sold cocaine to finance their trip, and drugs, from marijuana to LSD, are part of their journey. In their travels, they experience life in a commune and befriend a lawyer (Jack Nicholson). But they face hostility (the lawyer is murdered) and, in the end, they are also killed. The movie defined an era where the rebellion of youth came to the forefront and the soundtrack forever linked rock ‘n’ roll to the journey on the road.

7. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)

Robert Pirsig’s book became a surprise bestseller, despite being rejected initially by dozens of publishers. It tells the fictionalized autobiographical story of a motorcycle trip he took with his son from Minnesota to California. Along the way, the narrative contemplates various philosophical and psychological issues. What the travelers found was inward, not outward. “Sometimes,” Pirsig writes, “it’s a little better to travel than arrive.”

8. Rain Man (1988)

Awkward pairings are elemental in road narratives. Few are as different as the brothers Charlie and Ray, portrayed by Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman. One is an upscale collectibles dealer and the other is an institutionalized autistic savant. On their car journey from Cincinnati to Los Angeles, Charlie copes with the regimented habits of his brother and comes to appreciate and understand him. In Las Vegas, Ray uses his mathematical abilities to count cards and win big at blackjack. In the end, Ray returns to the institution where he lives, and Charlie promises to see him again, having come to appreciate his brother and realize he wants him in his life.

9. Thelma and Louise (1991)

What starts as a girls’ weekend away becomes a one-way road trip to eternity. Geena Davis (Thelma) and Susan Sarandon (Louise), looking to escape from a domineering husband and deadening job, plan a weekend at a cabin. But after a stop at a roadhouse where Thelma is nearly raped and Louise kills her attacker, the women go on the lam. Along the way, their friendship and confidence grow, but they reach a point of no return as authorities bear down on them. They gas the engine and head toward a gorge. The film leaves the two of them in still frame, forever suspended in mid-air, pointed upward, out and away.

10. The Road (2006)

In this famous post-apocalyptic work, Cormac McCarthy tells the story of a loving father and his young son journeying across a forbidding landscape. There is danger and horror everywhere and the pair struggle to survive. They strive to reach water, and do. But the father dies and the son is left to carry on with another family, who discover him. Father and son had “set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other’s world entire.” If each is the other’s world entire, it matters not where you are on the road.

^{Feature image: Photo by Jaro Bielik on Unsplash.}

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10 books to read this Pride Month [reading list]

Dive into ten remarkable books that illuminate the diverse and vibrant experiences of the LGBTQ+ community. From historical explorations that uncover the rich tapestry of LGBTQ+ history to biographies of influential musical figures who have shaped the cultural landscape, these books offer invaluable perspectives. Whether you’re looking to educate yourself, find inspiration, or simply enjoy compelling stories, these books are essential reads that honor and uplift LGBTQ+ voices.

Choosing Love: What LGBTQ+ Christians Can Teach Us All About Relationships, Inclusion, and Justice

What does the battle between conservative Christians and LGBTQ+ people look like from the vantage point of those who are both? Choosing Love brings together LGBTQ+ conservative Christian experiences with insights from civil rights thinkers, Black feminism, and queer thinkers of color.

Learn more about Choosing Love by Dawne Moon and Theresa W. Tobin

On Elton John: An Opinionated Guide

A lively and imaginative exploration of the career and music of the Rocket Man. Elton John is not only “still standing,” he is a living superlative, the ultimate record-breaking, award-winning survivor of the great era of pop and rock music that he helped to shape during his six decades in the music industry.

Learn more about On EltonJohn by Matthew Restall

The Dandy: A People’s History of Sartorial Splendour

The Dandy: A People’s History of Sartorial Splendour constitutes the first ever history of those dandies who emanated from the less privileged layers of the populace—the lowly clerks, shop assistants, domestic servants, and labourers who increasingly emerged as style-conscious men about town during the modern age. Discover the hidden history of the transgender dandy in interwar Paris and Berlin, the zoot suiter, the teddy boy, the New Romantic, and the many colourful dandies from the past that continue to influence us today.

Learn more about The Dandy by Peter K. Andersson

The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke

In the prize-winning The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, Jeffrey C. Stewart offers the definitive biography of the father of the Harlem Renaissance, based on the extant primary sources of his life and on interviews with those who knew him personally. This year marks the 100th anniversary of The New Negro. What better way to celebrate than by learning more about the life of Alain Locke, the man who popularized the term.

Learn more about The New Negro by Jeffrey C. Stewart

The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse in America

The Things She Carried explores how purses have served as more than fashion accessories—they’ve been symbols of privacy, pride, and activism. Kathleen B. Casey examines their role in breaking social barriers, from Black women in the civil rights movement to LGBTQ+ individuals using bags to defend their bodies and as declarations of identity. This powerful history highlights how everyday objects can become tools for resistance and self-expression, making it a compelling read for Pride Month and beyond.

Learn more about The Things She Carried by Kathleen B. Casey

Colette: My Literary Mother

Colette was a pioneering, ground-breaking modernist writer, but has not always had her originality and worth recognized in Britain. Her work provocatively uses unstable narratives, gaps, silences, fairytale, mythical tropes, and sensual evocations of childhood, sex, and landscapes. Michèle Roberts examines how Colette expresses her unsettling content on desire, perversion, ageing, and different forms of love.

Learn more about Colette by Michèle Roberts

James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”

James Baldwin’s work remains profoundly relevant, offering a lens into the intersections of race, sexuality, and identity. His fiction explores personal dilemmas amid complex social pressures, as seen in Giovanni’s Room, which centers gay and bisexual experiences, and Sonny’s Blues, where music becomes a metaphor for resilience. Tom Jenks’s analysis of Sonny’s Blues highlights Baldwin’s meticulous storytelling, showing how the narrative stays with readers. Baldwin’s exploration of masculinity, race, and class challenged norms and shaped conversations around LGBTQ+ rights, making his work essential reading.

Learn more about James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” by Tom Jenks

Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe: Male-Male Sexual Relations, 1400-1750

Until quite recently, the history of male-male sexual relations was a taboo topic. But when historians eventually explored the archives of Florence, Venice and elsewhere in Europe, they brought to light an extraordinary world of early modern sexual activity, extending from city streets and gardens to taverns, monasteries and Mediterranean galleys.

Learn more about Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe by Sir Noel Malcolm

The Well of Loneliness

The Well of Loneliness is among the most famous banned books in history. A pioneering work of literature, Radclyffe Hall’s novel charts the development of a ‘female sexual invert’, Stephen Gordon, who from childhood feels an innate sense of masculinity and desire for women.

Learn more about The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall

Leaves of Grass

Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass stands as one of the most influential and innovative literary works of the last two hundred years. Widely credited as the originator of free verse in English, Whitman put forward a radical new language of the body, the nation, and same-sex love.

Learn more about Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

Check out these books and more on Bookshop US and Bookshop UK.

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How to read like Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin left many anecdotes about his reading in his autobiography and other writings. Though he presents himself as an example of how reading can enrich a person’s life, he never really codified his personal reading as how-to advice, but that does not mean that I cannot do so. Therefore, in Undaunted Mind: The Intellectual Life of Benjamin Franklin, I discuss many aspects of Franklin’s reading life: what he read, where he read, how he read, and why he read. What follows is a set of practical tips derived from Franklin’s experience to get the most from your reading.

1. Take advantage of spare moments. 

Reading about vegetarianism in Thomas Tryon’s Way to Health, Long Life and Happiness when he was an apprentice in Boston under his brother James, Benjamin Franklin convinced himself that he could prepare cheaper and healthier meals than James and his other employees took at the local tavern. When they went to lunch, Franklin stayed behind in the printshop, enjoyed his solo lunch, and spent the spare hour reading. He used the money he saved on meals to buy more books: the mark of a true bookman. In a life jampacked with activity to benefit the community and the nation, Franklin would apply what he learned as an apprentice: he always took advantage of whatever spare moments he could to enjoy reading.

2. Keep an open mind about unusual ideas. 

One book he read as an apprentice was Philemon Holland’s English translation of Pliny’s Natural History, a landmark in Franklin’s reading life. He laughed at Pliny’s account of a practice among the seamen of his time to still the waves in a storm by pouring oil into the sea, which Franklin considered a silly superstition. When he learned decades later that oil could indeed calm bodies of water, Franklin felt embarrassed by how readily he had rejected this Plinyism without careful consideration. It took a long time to learn, but he eventually realized that readers must not dismiss ideas from different times, lands, or cultures.

3. Talk about books with others. 

Here is something nonreaders never realize: people’s conversation reflects their reading. Franklin learned this lesson after he had run away from Boston. Passing through New Jersey, he encountered a surgeon and poet named John Browne, who could tell by the way the teenaged Franklin talked that he was an avid reader. Their shared love of literature formed the basis for their lifelong friendship. Once Franklin settled in Philadelphia, he befriended other young men who loved to read. Eventually, he and his friends formed a mutual improvement club they called the Junto, and, as in a modern-day book club, book discussions became a prominent feature of their weekly meetings.

4. Assemble your own home library. 

The Junto members each had a personal library, but Franklin got the idea for them to combine their collections to form a library greater than any of them could assemble individually. The communal library did not work, but it would lead to the formation of the Library Company of Philadelphia, the first subscription library in North America. Though the Library Company was a great resource for its subscribers, Franklin still recognized the importance for them to have home libraries of their own, which would provide ready references in the case of practical works and a never-ending source of entertainment, which a good collection of poetry, essays, and plays could provide.

5. Share your books with others. 

Sir Richard Steele’s Dramatic Works was one book of plays Franklin had in his personal library, at least until he loaned it to a friend, who never returned it. More than most possessions, books are notoriously difficult things to return. Franklin told his friend Benjamin Rush “that a man lost ten percent on the value, by lending his books, [and] that he once knew a man who never returned a borrowed book, because no one ever returned books borrowed from him.” Despite the unreturned books, Franklin continued to loan volumes from his library to friends throughout his life. He decided that the opportunity to share the ideas they contained was worth the risk.

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Excerpts from <em>Electronic Enlightenment</em>’s Spring 2025 update

We have recently published five new blog posts on Electronic Enlightenment. These blogs cover a range of insightful topics and will be linked through our announcement newsletter, offering fresh insights and valuable information to you.

Each blog is crafted to enlighten and engage, providing you with information and discussions on the history of the Barham Family, Charles Bertram, William Stukeley, Phillis Wheatley Peters, and the history of slavery through the letters of well-known historical figures. Check out the excerpts below and read the full blog posts and more on Electronic Enlightenment. 

“The Plantation Papers of the Barham Family” by Tessa van Wijk

After the survey of 300 letters and some legal papers, the 16 letters for this mini-edition were chosen to represent seven themes relating to the management of the sugar plantations and, specifically, the enslaved workers. The seven themes present in these letters are the following: (1) providing for enslaved people, (2) efficiency and purchasing of enslaved workers, (3) punishment and reward of enslaved workers, (4) enslaved workers rebelling, revolting and/or running away, (5) pregnancy, birth, and enslaved children, (6) illness & health of enslaved workers, and, lastly, (7) (anti-)slavery debate and sentiment…. 

Several of the 16 letters from the Barham Papers’ Jamaica Correspondence added to Electronic Enlightenment can tell us about the health and well-being of the enslaved people working on the Mesopotamia Estate and Island Estate…. 

These letters also shed light on important political developments at the time. Specifically, when it comes to the rise of anti-slavery sentiment, abolition, and the unstable political situation in European colonies. 

Read the full blog here.

“Colonial Myth-making and Anti-Scottish Sentiment in Charles Bertram’s Letters to William Stukeley” by Sophie Dickson

Charles Bertram urged William Stukeley to forgive his faults. These faults, he admitted, were his undying love for antiquities and his rude intrusion into Stukeley’s acquaintance. However, Bertram’s interruption of Stukeley’s professional and social circle birthed a collection of 32 letters spanning from 1746 to 1764, later collated by Stukeley. Early in their communication, Bertram revealed the spectacular discovery of what he claims were fifteenth-century manuscript fragments written by a “Ricardi Monachi Westmonasteriensis.” The manuscript detailed lost geographical information of Roman Britain, assembled from various contemporary Roman sources such as Beda, Orosius, Pliny, and Ptolemy. Through their correspondence, Bertram gradually shared fragments of the manuscript with Stukeley until its publication in 1757 as De Situ Britanniae(The Description of Britain).

Read about the manuscript here.

“Epistolary Form in the Letters from Charles Bertram to William Stukeley” by Olivia Flynn

Using the collection of 32 letters written by the literary forger Charles Julius Bertram to the Antiquarian William Stukeley between 1747 and 1763 as a case study, Flynn explores the different sub-genres of letters. The purpose and subject matter of letters of the eighteenth century vary greatly, according to the purpose and style of the letter. They included the consolation letter, familial letters, business letters, petitions, political missives, public letters to newspapers and periodicals, and, of course, love letters.

This blog post focuses on the introductory letter and the often overlooked medical diagnosis letter. 

Read the blog post here.

“Slavery in the Electronic Enlightenment Collection” by Tessa van Wijk

According to Jean Le Rond d’Alembert to Voltaire [François Marie Arouet], 14 April 1760, the metaphorical use of terms such as ‘esclavage’ and ‘esclave’ is typical of eighteenth-century French authors. The connotation with the enslavement of African people or the Triangular Slave Trade was a lot less frequently present. Rather, the words ‘esclave’ and ‘esclavage’ are more often defined in opposition to freedom and liberty: “A slave, for the eighteenth century, is someone who was deprived of their freedom, whatever the form or cause of this deprivation”….

The top five letter writers with the most letters in the final list of results are Simon Taylor (57), Edmund Pendleton (42), William Cowper (23), William Fitzhugh (21), and Francis Fauquier (15). Except for William Cowper, these men all had interests in the continuation of the slave trade and slavery, and their letters can mostly be found in categories relating to the owning of and trading in enslaved people….

In Edmund Pendleton’s letters, we can clearly see that enslaved people are considered as personal property. Pendleton was an American plantation-owner and slaveowner, as well as an attorney. Several of his letters in Electronic Enlightenment discuss legal affairs, particularly inheritances. 

Read the full blog post here.

“Phillis Wheatley Peters” by Kate Davies

Wheatley Peters’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) is one of the most important books to be published anywhere in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. It is important because it is a book written by a black woman who was very well aware that her new professional status as an author held the key to her own freedom. It is important because it is a work of creative intellect, whose young writer displayed her imaginative prowess while revealing her adroit mastery of the contemporary literary forms of lyric, elegy, and ode. It is important because it is a work of faith that spoke profoundly to a committed culture of evangelical Christianity, out of which the humanitarian movement to abolish the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery was beginning to emerge…. 

What did this book contain? In her Poems, Wheatley Peters gathered a substantial collection of thirty-nine pieces, including a range of elegies and odes, and hymns. There were poems about the inspiration of breaking dawns, soft evening light and the power of memory; poems which took their cue from Old Testament verses; poems urging religious virtue upon wayward Harvard students; and poems in which Wheatley Peters shared the grief of members of her congregation at Boston‘s Old South Meeting House at the sad loss of friends and family members. One poem was importantly dedicated to Scipio Moorhead, the talented Boston artist, who, like Wheatley Peters, was one of the approximately 5,000 enslaved black people then living in Massachusetts. 

Read the complete blog post here.

These excerpts have been lightly edited to fit the OUPblog’s style guide. No content was changed, and the full blog posts can be found at each of the above hyperlinks and on Electronic Enlightenment.

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Elleke Boehmer’s seminal <em>Colonial and Postcolonial Literature</em> at 30

May 2025 marks the 30^th anniversary of Elleke Boehmer’s seminal text Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors, first published by OUP in 1995 with a second edition following a decade later. It remains a landmark publication in the field of colonial and postcolonial literature and beyond, read, studied, and taught the world over. 

To mark this wonderful achievement, Elleke Boehmer reflects on her book and its longevity and shares some of her “must reads.” We are also pleased to offer chapter 4 “Metropolitans and Mimics”—as chosen by the author—free-to-read this May.

Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors continues to find its way to readers right around the world. In this sense, it is not unlike the migrating metaphors of the title—the images and motifs connecting imperial and postimperial texts that the book explores throughout. 

When I first published the book, I hoped that it would give greater profile to the great wealth and variety of postcolonial writing, alongside investigating its complicated roots in traditions of empire writing. On balance, I daresay that it has achieved those aims. But I had no idea that, 30 years on, the book would still be globally read, cited, prescribed, and discussed, as my academic news feeds tell me it is. I ask myself what its features are that have contributed to its ongoing success. From what I can tell, these include the book’s interest in empire as a system of textual circulation, and also its focus on the exchange of metaphors of land and belonging that interlink Anglophone postcolonial writings worldwide. Essays from across the postcolonial and world literature fields, including in French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch, have picked up on these aspects. The translation of the book into Mandarin in 1999 seems to have ensured the book’s position also as prominent critical text on university courses in China. About 15 years ago, when first I visited the country, wherever I went people said kind things about the book, and talked about its beautiful cover, based on a painting by the Australian artist Lisa Hill.

The second and expanded edition, published in 2005, offered an updated bibliography and timeline, and two brand-new chapters featuring more postcolonial women writers from the turn of the new century, and more coverage of Indigenous and First Nations authors from countries like Aotearoa/New Zealand and Canada. 

Elleke Boehmer, Oxford, 2025

Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction, 2nd edition

Robert Young

Fascinating for its treatment of the postcolonial as a mind-set, as expressed in a wide range of cultural forms.

Read more.

Pacific Islands Writing: The Postcolonial Literatures of Aotearoa/New Zealand and Oceania

Michelle Keown

A sparkling and wide-ranging discussion of the postcolonial writing of a region that covers half the surface of the earth, oceanically-speaking.

Read more.

Present Imperfect: Contemporary South African Writing

Andrew van der Vlies

A far-reaching account of post-millennial writing from South Africa, through the sometimes-unlikely lens of affect theory.

Read more.

V.S. Naipaul, Caribbean Writing and Caribbean Thought

William Ghosh

A compelling account of the towering figure of V.S. Naipaul set in relation to the layered Caribbean contexts from which his writing sprang.

Read more.

Editor’s note: Read William Ghosh writing on the OUPblog: Homi K. Bhabha on V.S. Naipaul: in conversation with William Ghosh

Live Artefacts: Literature in a Cognitive Environment

Terence Cave

A provocative study of literary writing, postcolonial or otherwise, as an instrument through which we come to new understanding.

Read more.

All books cited in this blog are available to read via Oxford Academic. Use your institutional access to sign in, or if you don’t have access, recommend Oxford Academic to your library.

_{Featured image by Elleke Boehmer and used with permission.}

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Crafting the queer citational turn

It’s a crisp summer morning, and I’ve just made the half hour walk from Sommerville, Massachusetts, to Harvard University. The grounds are majestic, as you’d expect, but everything is fragmented by iron fence railings (gates all locked or staffed by security) and garish white tents that have been installed for graduation festivities. I show my ID and make my way into the Houghton Library reading room where I’ll continue my research on craftwork for a project on queer modernist materialities. As a fan of the show Dickinson, which aired on Apple TV+ for three seasons from 2019-2021, I’ve asked to see the scrapbook set designer Marina Parker made for the archive. I’m fascinated by contemporary adaptations of literary pasts, and Parker’s scrapbook suggests how craft itself might be fundamental to those queer reworkings. 

As I carefully flip through the scrapbook’s pages, I’m struck by the care Parker has taken in assembling a material record of the show, which pays particular attention to Emily Dickinson’s queerness and the cultural and literary pasts of American activism. Wallpaper swatches are pasted in alongside sources of flooring inspiration, such as the checkered black and white floor she discovered while on a meditation retreat held in an old Massachusetts mansion. Correspondence with some of the oldest continually operating artisan design businesses (like lacemakers and carpet weavers) intwine with Parker’s record of her research rabbit holes. These imbricated textual and material records form a kind of citational archive—in recording her sources, Parker shows in very real terms how the work of a single set designer depends on a network of collaborators.

One particularly unique set of citations emerges in the various “shout outs” Parker records in the scrapbook. For example, on one page she writes about the task of curating the artworks in Dickinson’s brother and sister-in-law’s house, The Evergreens. She names the Assistant Set Decorator, acknowledges her specific contributions, and writes, “SHE DID A FANTASTIC JOB!” 

In an email (my gratitude to curator Christine Jacobson for connecting us), I asked Parker to reflect on the place of these notably enthusiastic scrapbook citations. In her reply, she described her difficulty finding a place in the film industry earlier in her career and moving towards collaboration as a core principle: 

The path to creative satisfaction seemed to be to seek as much creative control as possible. The reality though, is—the pace, breadth, & scope of film work, makes it unrealistic and impossible to truly work alone. And inspiration is often nurtured by exchange. In subsequent years I’ve slowly discovered / am discovering a community of people whose inspired ideas & work ethic I admire. Collaborating with talented, generous, delightful people has become one of my favorite parts of working in film; I now consider collaboration a real gift. I very much want to lift up, acknowledge, and appreciate the many hands and hearts behind the work.  

This scrapbook, in addition to Parker’s ethical and artistic commitments to generous citation, align with larger trends in feminist and queer scholarship. In more particular terms, this approach to not just acknowledging—but actively celebrating—a collaborative process takes its cues from the history of craft. While writing Crafting Feminism from Literary Modernism to the Multimedia Present, I also aspired to represent the “many hands and hearts” that contributed both practically and intellectually to what is ultimately a single-author monograph.

Sara Ahmed has described her own citation practices (not citing any white men in Living a Feminist Life, for example) as a way of building new structures for belonging. She suggests that, “Citation is feminist memory,” a way to craft community when departure seems like a necessary path. The theorist becomes a craftsperson as “Citations can be feminist bricks: they are the materials through which, from which, we create our dwellings. My citation policy has affected the kind of house I have built.” Ahmed describes the intellectual work of feminist writing as deeply predicated on her own willingness to be vulnerable and to respond reciprocally in encounters with readers or audiences of various kinds. In that way, she changes the materials of her craft to capture this dynamic of exposure: “Perhaps citations are feminist straw: lighter materials that, when put together, still create a shelter but a shelter that leaves you more vulnerable.” The house of scholarship, therefore, seems made of bricks—and other times, straw strikes Ahmed as the more appropriate material. 

The artisanal properties of citation emerge in Susan Howe’s work on archives as a kind of serendipitous encounter with craft. She describes the processes by which “Often by chance, via out-of-the-way-card catalogues, or through previous web surfing, a particular ‘deep’ text, or a simple object (bobbin, sampler, scrap of lace) reveals itself here at the surface of the visible, by mystic documentary telepathy.” To illustrate the dynamic interplay of this telepathy, Howe engages in rigorous citation across texts and archives, both public-facing and personal. In one section, Howe quotes Stein’s invocation to “Think in stitches,” prompting the reader to understand the queer encounter at play in the archive, mediated by craft: “In looking up from her embroidery she looks at me.” Instead of bricks or straw, textile knots become her source material for crafting a creative-critical text such as Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives. She writes: 

Quotations are skeins or collected knots. “KNOT, (n., not…) The complication of threads made by knitting; a tie, union of cords by interweaving; as, a knot difficult to be untied.” Quotations are lines or passages taken at hazard from piled up cultural treasures. A quotation, cut, or closely teased out as if with a needle, can interrupt the continuous flow of a poem, a tapestry, a picture, an essay; or a piece of writing like this one. “STITCH, n. A single pass of a needle in sewing.” 

Howe’s vision of the quotation-as-knot both interrupts the flow of an essay or poem while also holding it together—like a binding. (Here I must admit to checking the Index of my book for my own reference to Virginia Woolf’s “heaped up things” in The Years, which in a footnote I describe as “a temporal phenomenon and a record of trauma recall[ing] Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History […] in which ‘His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage.’ It reminds me of Howe’s “piled up cultural treasures”…This line of quotations, or knots, extends between disparate texts, connecting them—stitching these references in a row.)

Multimedia scholars such as Storm Greenwood are crafting the queer citational turn quite literally through the project of “Devotional Citation,” a praxis Greenwood started in 2017 at the “intersection of visual art and decolonial feminist scholarship.” “Devotional Citation” is predicated on a praise framework that is reciprocal and resists the “commodification of study.” Many of Greenwood’s Citations are circulated in a gift economy of stitched quotations that are given back to the author, their words transformed into a new textual artwork. As the recipient of a Devotional Citation that quotes Crafting Feminism, I am struck by the ways in which quotes are remade through contact with Greenwood’s craftwork. Not only are the pieces illuminated—as in, illustrated and decorated with gold metallic pigment—they are illuminating; this citational practice reveals new dimensions of writing on craft through the very stitched nature of each word. 

Scholars are increasingly thinking about the shape their work takes, with citation as a collaborative process that can be made visible or even ritualized—such as the authors of “Feminist Citational Praxis and Problems of Practice” who describe the process of co-authoring a dissertation and engaging in citation practices, or rituals, that “provide an opportunity to ‘flip the scrip’ on CisHeteroPatriarchy.” Or on the topic of “Collabowriting,” Suzanne Churchill and Adam McKible argue that, scholarship is “collaborative in nature: the term ‘monograph’ actually belies the exchange of ideas that occurred through print and over time to produces the work. Collaboration animates and personalizes the scholarly exchange.” Or, one final example: I was recently delighted to see that Danielle Taschereau Mamers had taken visual notes of my exchange with a group of graduate students at the University of Toronto (thank you to Claire Battershill for this joyful invitation). In these notes, Mamers cites me as the speaker but also interweaves her own perspective on the conversation and represents the students’ various questions and prompts, too. The topic of craft and scholarship is enlarged by the visual-verbal patchwork. 

Writing a book is a process of encounter between voices and ideas throughout history—and our citational rituals form a thread, stitching the project together as a crafted object. As those conversations become more intentionally oriented towards variously inclusive methods, craft’s tactile, transhistoric metaphors and practices will form an important stitch in the future of scholarship.

_{Featured image by Mel Poole via Unsplash.}

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How did English literature become a university subject?

Even if you didn’t ‘read English’ at university yourself, you almost certainly know plenty of people who did, and more or less everyone has had to study English literature at school at some point or other. As a subject, ‘English’ (an adjective masquerading as a noun) has been central to educational arrangements in Britain for well over a century, seeming for much of that time to occupy a privileged place in the wider culture as well.

Yet literature may seem the most unlikely candidate for becoming a recognized academic discipline. For the most part, science and scholarship have operated with implicit canons of enquiry that have emphasized objectivity, verified knowledge, causal analysis, and impersonal, replicable forms of argument and presentation. But the reader’s encounter with works of imaginative literature does not easily lend itself to such treatment, involving instead subjectivity, degrees of responsiveness, evaluative judgement, and highly individual forms of imaginative re-creation.

As a result, there was initially scepticism about, even considerable resistance to, the idea that the study of vernacular literature might merit a place alongside the new disciplines being established in the expanding universities of the nineteenth century, and even when it had secured a foothold in the curriculum it continued to be derided in some quarters as ‘a soft option’. Surely the reading of enjoyable works of literature in one’s native language, so the objection went, was an activity to be pursued in one’s leisure hours? A university concerned itself with matters of exact scholarship and rigorous reasoning, as in the established disciplines of Classics and Mathematics: appreciation of the beauties of poetry had no claim to rank alongside these strenuous exercises, and, besides, it was clearly impossible to devise an objective way to examine achievement in such a personal, even emotional, activity.

So how did the improbable marriage of beauty and the footnote came to pass; or in other words, how did English, despite these and other objections, establish itself within British universities so successfully that it could sometimes be spoken of by the beginning of the 1960s as the ‘central’ subject in those institutions—even, in some hard-to-define way, as central to the culture at large? The answer to this question cannot take the form of a seamless narrative. We need, for example, to think about some of the larger enabling contextual conditions—the prior reverence for an established canon of English literature, the authority of Classics as a model and a rival, the formative role of history and philology as exemplars of serious scholarship. We also need to examine the relevant institutional developments between the late eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries: how far was the Scottish tradition of teaching ‘rhetoric and belles-lettres’ a genuine precursor of ‘Eng Lit’; what were the early civic universities actually like; why were Oxford and, especially, Cambridge comparatively late in establishing courses in English; why was English disproportionately prominent in the institutions founded for the higher education of women; and how did these developments relate to what was going on in schools?

Shifting the focus, we need to think about the roles played by some of those who are regarded as among the ‘founding figures’ of the discipline—some who are well-known, such as Matthew Arnold and A.C. Bradley, but also some who are not, such as John Churton Collins, George Saintsbury, Walter Raleigh, and Arthur Quiller-Couch, as well as thinking about the status of the ‘professorial estate’ more generally, looking at its economic circumstances, its recruitments patterns, and so on. And what about the everyday forms of departments, journals, professional associations and so on? They can’t be left out of the story, can they?

Once we’d done all this, we’d be in a position to challenge the conventional accounts of ‘the rise of English’, showing, for example, that I.A. Richards’s supposedly transformative effect on the discipline was in reality more limited, and that the vogue for ‘criticism’ spread more slowly and more unevenly than has been assumed. In fact, we would eventually discover that most English departments at the beginning of the 1960s still had very traditional-looking syllabuses.

At present, ‘Eng Lit’ is widely seen as a discipline in crisis, with reductions in courses and even closures of whole departments being reported across the country. These problems are systemic and there is no one answer to them, but whatever view we take of the current position and future prospects of the study and teaching of English literature, the essential starting point has to be a more adequate account of the history of the enterprise, one that does not reductively depict it in either sinister or salvationist terms.

_{Feature image by Patrick Tomasso via Unsplash.}

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Five inspiring biographies for Women’s History Month [reading list]

In honor of Women’s History Month, we are celebrating the lives and legacies of inspiring women that played path-breaking roles in shaping philosophy and literature. This reading list features five books that amplify the achievements of these women who were either overshadowed by men, or subject to hierarchical thinking. As we work to accelerate action for gender equality these five biographies show a defiance against systemic barriers and biases faced by women, both in personal and professional spheres. From the engrossing biographies of famous literary authors, to the eye-opening accounts of female thinkers who were silenced by the social norms of the times, these books are sure to inspire action, equality, and inclusion.

1. The Enlightenment’s Most Dangerous Woman by Andrew Janiak

Just as the Enlightenment was gaining momentum throughout Europe, philosopher Émilie Du Châtelet broke through the many barriers facing women at the time and published a major philosophical treatise in French. Within a few short years, she became famous. This was not just remarkable because she was a woman, but because of the substance of her contributions. However due to the threat that she posed, the men who created the modern philosophy canon (primarily Voltaire and Kant) eventually wrote Du Châtelet out of their official histories – her ideas were suppressed, or attributed to the men around her, and for generations afterwards, she was forgotten.

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2. Bright Circle by Randall Fuller

Transcendentalism remains the most important literary and philosophical movement to have originated in the United States. Most accounts of it, however, trace its emergence to a group of young intellectuals (primarily Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau) dissatisfied with their religious, literary, and social culture. Yet there is a forgotten history of transcendentalism—a submerged counternarrative—that features a network of fiercely intelligent women who were central to the development of the movement even as they found themselves silenced by their culturally-assigned roles as women. Many ideas once considered original to Emerson and Thoreau are shown to have originated with women who had little opportunity of publicly expressing them.

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3. Mary Wollstonecraft: A Very Short Introduction by E.J. Clery

Mary Wollstonecraft is widely hailed as the mother of modern feminism. The book that made her famous, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, is a work of worldwide renown. Yet the range of her achievements as a thinker and writer reaches far beyond this text. She was a multi-faceted author, and although the condition of women was a constant preoccupation throughout her life, she wrote on a wide variety of topics and in a range of literary forms, some of which she created herself. This Very Short Introduction examines the conditions for Wollstonecraft’s emergence as a feminist, but also her status as an educator, a political thinker, and a romantic.

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4. Octavia E. Butler: H is for Horse by Chi-ming Yang

The figure of the horse, at once earthly and transcendent, represented the contradictions of freedom and captivity that enabled young Octavia to develop her nuanced sense of voice and place. Drawing on previously unknown archival research, this volume illustrates how Butler’s development as a writer was tied to her extraordinary resourcefulness and self-awareness growing up as an awkward, bookish Black girl in segregated, Cold War Pasadena. She persistently re-visited and revised her early writings on teenage angst, Martians, Westerns, and racial politics. In one way or another, her supernatural characters defied the constraints of gender, race, and class with equine-inflected resilience.

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5. Marion Milner: On Creativity by David Russell

The British essayist, artist, and psychoanalyst Marion Milner thought deeply about how reading, drawing, and getting better related to each other. The guiding question of Milner’s life was of how people come to feel alive in, and feel creatively responsive to, their own lives. In pursuit of this, Milner explored fields as diverse as anthropology, folklore, education, literature, art, philosophy, mysticism, and psychology. She became one of the twentieth century’s most extraordinary thinkers about creativity. Key to all her writing is her search for creative practices of attention and how the interplay of past and present selves, allows us to find new ways of looking at, and experiencing, the world.

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For more titles, you can also view our extended list on Bookshop:

• Bookshop UK
• Bookshop US

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<em>Moby-Dick</em> and the United States of Aggrievement

Like the white whale itself, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) seems ubiquitous across time. For nearly a century, readers have turned to Captain Ahab’s search for the whale that took his leg to understand American crises. During the Cold War, commentators debated Ahab’s Stalin-like powers. After the September 11 terrorist attacks, the question of vengeance took center stage. Was Ahab Mohammad Attah crashing an American Airlines jet into the World Trade Center’s North Tower, or was he George W. Bush searching for weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq?

Donald Trump’s return to the presidency offers a different question about Melville, domination, and US political life: How do Americans gain power by claiming that they have been wronged? Trump continues to shatter political norms, but complaining about mistreatment is part of the nation’s DNA. As erratic and self-indulgent as it may be, Trump’s sense of injury stretches back to the series of grievances that the Declaration of Independence itemized about King George III.

The first Trump administration cultivated comparisons to Andrew Jackson, the populist president whose election proclaimed the rise of the self-determined white man. Look behind the myths of Jacksonian democracy, however, and you will find a nation of teeming resentments. A nineteenth-century visitor observed that Americans had an unusual fondness for lawsuits and cheerfully took each other to court. Alexis de Tocqueville noted that while Americans were initially difficult to insult, their resentments, once ignited, took a long time to burn out. Ralph Waldo Emerson famously begrudged every dollar he gave to charity as an infringement on his “manhood” and individuality.

Against this backdrop Melville imagined Captain Ahab’s ruinous quest. The feeling of perpetual grievance animates the captain’s violent path through the world. “I’d strike the sun if it insulted me,” he tells Starbuck, warning the First Mate that power resides in collecting real and imagined wounds. Ahab seems so difficult to resist because the crew believe that in seeking retribution for his injuries, they will get justice for their own. Historian Timothy Snyder has used the phrase “anticipatory obedience” to describe the way populations capitulated to twentieth-century authoritarians without being asked or forced. Melville depicted this phenomenon a decade before the Civil War. Starbuck openly challenges Ahab’s desire for revenge, but with profound dread, he feels himself already succumbing to the captain’s “lurid woe.”

It is hardly surprising that the authoritarian-loving Trump employs the language of vengeance that Moby-Dick so brilliantly explores: “I am your justice,” he told the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2023. “And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.” Trying to explain Trump’s appeal, pundits have identified multiple resentments among the white working class, but they should look deeper into his supporters’ belief that, long before the assassination attempts, he had been flagrantly wronged. Trump is a convicted felon, an accused sexual predator, a billionaire who ignores bills, accountability, and the most basic laws. For decades, he has ruined people’s lives with relish rather than remorse. And yet, from the oligarchs of Silicon Valley to the sycophants of Fox News, our politics seems addicted to the idea that Trump has been persecuted, cheated, and dispossessed.

Homer’s Iliad tells the story of Achilles, whose damaged pride leaves him sulking in his tent and refusing to join the Greek siege of Troy. For all his self-pity, though, Achilles does not convince his fellow warriors to withdraw their armies from the fight. His resentments remain his own. Melville recognized that in the turbulent world of American democracy, aggrievement was a powerful political tool. Seconds before he throws his final harpoon, Ahab exclaims what we might regard as a recipe for the “irresistible dictatorship” he exerts over the crew: “Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief.” 

Let me be clear: Ahab is too elevated, expressive, and philosophically self-aware to be explained by the MAGA movement. And yet, amid all his heroic complexity, the seeds of American aggrievement appear throughout his quest. When he inspires the harpooners, humiliates Starbuck, or tricks his crew, he revels in his own autocratic powers. Think of Trump nursing his bruises as he denies protection to his critics, threatens journalists with lawsuits, and fires the government workers who once held him to account. And think of all those accomplices lining up behind him, shamelessly claiming that he has been victimized by a deep state hoax. 

The recent bans on DEI remind us that the grievances that count for this administration—and for too many administrations before it—primarily concern Christian nationalists and conservative white men. Moving further into the second Trump presidency, we need to interrogate the power the nation gives to their perceived injuries.

Ahab dies when he is strangled by the harpoon line attached to Moby Dick. The whale sinks his ship, and every crew member dies but one. I trust that Trump will come to a more peaceful, gilded end, but what happens to the rest of us? From Canada and Panama to Gaza, Greenland, and Ukraine (the list grows daily), the world seems stuck on an American ship bent on avenging the president’s wounded psyche. 

A wreck seems inevitable. Surviving that wreck does not.

_{Featured image by Matthew Gonzalez on Unsplash.}

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We are mythmaking creatures

Many of us feel disconnected, from ourselves, from others, from nature. We feel fragmented. But where are we to find a cure to our fragmentation? And how can we satisfy our longing for wholeness? The German and British romantics had a surprising answer: through mythology.

The romantics believed that in modern times we’ve forgotten something essential about ourselves. We’ve forgotten that we are mythmaking creatures, that the weaving of stories and the creation of symbols lies deep in our nature.

Today, we view myths as vestiges of a bygone era; products of a time when humanity lived in a state of childlike ignorance, lacking science and technology and the powers of rational reflection. William Blake (1757–1827) rejected this bias against mythology, as did Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772–1801), and John Keats (1795–1821), among others. They claimed that the worldview we now inhabit is a mythology of its own.

Our challenge, the romantics argued, is not to liberate humanity from myths but to create new myths—new symbols and stories—that serve to awaken the human mind to its hidden potential. We are all mythmakers. We all use our powers of imagination to sustain the worldview we inhabit. Our task is to become aware of those powers, and with that awareness rewrite the narratives that have kept us trapped in feelings of separation from ourselves and the world at large.

The modern experience is one of alienation, incompleteness, and aloneness. We’ve fallen prey to the illusion that everything is divided. The new mythologies that the romantics set out to create turn on symbols and stories of a greater unity that connects all things. The romantics held that our path to wholeness lies in reawakening the imagination and experiencing the world poetically. They believed that myths can allow us to see ourselves as members of a larger family—a “world family”—that includes all living beings on Earth.

But how, you might ask, is this even possible? How can mythology serve a liberating function? Are myths not false and deceptive? And shouldn’t we try to escape myths entirely?

All good questions, and ones the romantics heard loudly in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Here are four ways the romantics worked to address them:

1. Reinterpretation. Ancient myths are complex, even confusing, and their meaning is always open to interpretation and reworking.

Shelley’s play Prometheus Unbound is not a simple retelling of a classic myth. He reinvests the story with new meaning by positioning Prometheus as a symbol of humanity who struggles against Jupiter, a symbol of inhumanity. The old myth then acquires fresh significance; it becomes applicable to our modern yearning for community and connection with nature.

2. Reconciliation. The human mind abounds in dualities that can intensify feelings of separation; myths allow us to extend our minds beyond these dualities, thereby instilling feelings of unity.

Blake writes about how the mind creates contraries, such as “reason” and “feeling,” “man” and “woman,” “heaven” and “hell.” His literary and visual work afford us the opportunity to see that these oppositions are not absolute; they are two sides of a whole. A new poetic mythology can allow us to intuit this; it can open the “doors of perception” in ways that allow us to see the unity of the spiritual and the sensual.

3. Reflexivity. When we become aware of our mythmaking powers, we can fashion symbols and stories that position ourselves as the authors or artists of our lives.

In Heinrich von Ofterdingen by Hardenberg (known by his pen name Novalis), the protagonist discovers a book that reflects images from his own life. He has the uncanny realization that the book he is reading is a kind of mirror into his soul. The novel thereby displays a process of acquiring self-understanding through symbols, stories, images, and allegories—in short, through all the elements of mythology.

4. Participation. Because the romantics wanted to make us aware of our creative powers, the stories and symbols they fashion serve to invite us into the very process of mythmaking.

Schlegel’s novel Lucinde is a story about a young man who discovers his artistic potential by falling in love. The novel is itself an invitation for readers to turn inward and discover their own ability to make their lives into a work of art. The novel is meant to be a stimulus for self-inquiry for the reader, who is called upon to see herself through the lens of mythology.

What then makes any given mythology “new” is that it isn’t trying to mask its origin in the human imagination. All the mythologies of romanticism share this feature in common. They are ongoing works in progress, as alive today as they were over two centuries ago. The mythologies of romanticism are like paintings left deliberately unfinished by a painter, with the hope that we will feel inspired to pick up the brush and contribute our own complex patterns of color. 

_{Featured image by The Cleveland Museum of Art via Unsplash.}

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Meditations in purple

Children may have less height, vocabulary, and power than adults do. But children’s books are not a lesser art form. 

Consider Crockett Johnson’s Harold and the Purple Crayon. At first glance, the book looks self-explanatory. What more can be said about a boy, a crayon, and the moon?

Quite a lot. The 1955 classic’s deceptively transparent aesthetic makes it an ideal case study in what we miss when we neglect the art and design of the picture book.

Paul Klee once described drawing as “taking a line for a walk,” and this is exactly how Harold and the Purple Crayon begins. Harold decides “to go for a walk in the moonlight,” draws a moon, and then an entire 64-page adventure in which no line is wasted, and nothing erased.

Johnson creates the illusion that Harold is just making this up as he goes along, but the book is actually one giant drawing, revealed one page at a time. Caught up in the narrative and the story’s apparent simplicity, we don’t notice Johnson’s meticulous design. The invisibility of his artifice makes it seem like we are witnessing artistic creation in real time, and is one reason why Harold and the Purple Crayon has captivated readers for the past 70 years.

The book has held my attention for most of my life. I read it 50 years ago, began writing about Crockett Johnson 25 years ago, and published his biography 12 years ago. But you don’t need decades to look closely at art that interests you. You need only to focus and to ask questions.

If you read Harold and the Purple Crayon or any of its sequels when you were a child, how has your understanding of the books changed over time? Which left a greater impact on your memory—the books’ words or their images? (Former US Poet Laureate Rita Dove, who counts Harold and the Purple Crayon as her first favorite book, remembers it as wordless.) Why does Johnson give Harold a difficult-to-erase medium (the crayon) instead of an easily erasable one (say, chalk or pencil)? If Harold could erase, what might be the ripple effects of the erasures? Indeed, why does each Harold story conclude with our protagonist still in an imaginary realm, instead of returning him to a real bedroom—like Max in Where the Wild Things Are or the Darling children in Peter Pan—? Is the fact that Harold’s only home is the one he draws for himself a dream or a nightmare?

To ponder these questions (and others) is to accept an invitation to concentration, a practice that modern life discourages. The digital spaces of the social media multiverse thrive on immediacy, on the surprise of new information. They don’t grant us the distance from which to reflect, and to consider. We need to push aside that “heavy black rectangle of potentiality and dread”—to quote Jenny Odell’s description of cell phones—and pay attention to the world around us. Other people. Nature. Art.

And, of course, children’s books have much to say to those of us who are no longer children. Adults may discover insights unavailable to less experienced readers, just as children may arrive at interpretations lost to adults who have forgotten their own childhoods.

Though any art grows richer through the pleasures of sustained attention, I choose Harold and the Purple Crayon because picture books are an ideal place to begin looking closely. In addition to being many people’s introduction to visual art, a picture book is a portable art gallery. Perhaps because it arrives via a mass-produced object created for children, picture-book art does not always garner the respect that “fine art” does, even though fine artists Marc Chagall, David Hockney, Faith Ringgold, and Edward Lear (who made his living as a landscape painter) all created children’s books. And some of the finest artists have devoted their careers to creating picture books for young people: Maurice Sendak, Kadir Nelson, Beatrix Potter, Shaun Tan. But it is also fortunate that picture books are a more democratic art form, requiring only a library card, instead of, say, admission (and thus proximity) to a gallery.

Finally, as some of the first narratives we read (or have read to us), picture books show us how stories can make sense of the world and, in the case of Harold and the Purple Crayon, how we can create stories to guide us through that world. As Shaun Tan says of literature for children more generally, “Like a child daubing a paintbrush, it’s just enough to know that even the most modest scribble or wordplay can at any moment lead to a simple but profound realization: the world is just what you make of it, a big, unfinished picture book inside your head.”

The stories we encounter as children teach us whose stories are worth telling, which is one reasons I believe it’s important to explore the question of whether Harold is racially Black. Perhaps because his hands and face are tan, some readers have seen Harold as Black. His racial ambiguity is an inclusive choice—possibly also an intentional one, given Johnson’s early support for Civil Rights.

Since they enter our lives at such a formative time, the books we read when we are small can have a big impact on our imaginations. In this sense, children’s books are the most important books we read. They begin to establish the parameters for our dreaming, for the possible futures we can envision, and for the kind of life we might seek. As Ruha Benjamin puts it, “Who we imagine ourselves to be matters a great deal to who we become.”

_{Featured image by Townsend Walton via Unsplash.}

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“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow”: tragedy and the environmental crisis

Our environmental crisis is often described in tragic terms. Weather events shaped by global warming are deemed tragic for the communities affected. Declines in fish populations are attributed to the so-called tragedy of the commons. Mark Carney, former Governor of the Bank of England, has spoken of a “tragedy of the horizon”: that the “catastrophic impacts of climate change will be felt beyond the traditional horizons of most actors – imposing a cost on future generations that the current generation has no direct incentive to fix”.

Literary theorists point out that, when used in non-literary contexts such as these, the word tragedy often loses its distinct meanings. Nonetheless, working with tragic theory can, I think, help us reflect on the environmental crisis.

If, for example, we assume—as some commentators have—that the tragic figure is always somehow implicated in their suffering, then this brings into focus issues of climate justice: tragic narratives’ concern with accountability, that is, may illuminate the responsibility some global communities have to compensate others for the impacts of climate change and biodiversity loss.

Working with tragic theory might also help us reflect on our difficulty in responding to the crisis. In arguing that literary genres struggle to grapple with the timespans of environmental catastrophe (drawn attention to by Carney), the author Amitav Ghosh takes the realist novel as his example. As Jennifer Wallace points out, tragic catastrophe tends, similarly, to play out within a relatively short period—according to Aristotle’s strictures, a single day. This may render it unsuitable for representing environmental degradation and its impact on the world’s poor, a process influentially described by Rob Nixon as “slow violence”. Equally, Wallace argues, it may inhibit our capacity to see the environmental crisis as tragic.

Tragedy may also appear an unhelpful frame through which to approach the environmental crisis because, again like the realist novel, it’s a genre tightly focused on human experience rather than­—like pastoral or the georgic—on human interactions with the natural world. Tragedy is, we might say, created through the interplay of strong human emotions (ambition, love, grief) and situations where individual desires come into conflict with social—that is, manmade—systems.

Or so we’ve been told. Many scholars of tragedy have been wary of discussing other-than-human agency, and with good reason. Ascribing tragic suffering to fate or to the gods risks mystifying actions and consequences that should, in fact, be laid at the door of humans and their ideologies. Just as speaking of “natural” disasters—such as hurricanes—diverts attention from the political decisions—such as failing to maintain flood defences—that are responsible for human misery (and its inequitable distribution), so blaming tragic catastrophes on more-than-human forces might constitute an evasion of political responsibility.

But what if we were to take tragedy as a genre uncertain about human imbrication in the more-than-human world?

Shakespeare’s Macbeth offers a helpful example. For some critics, this play needs to be understood in human terms: for all its supernatural paraphernalia and gestures towards the natural world, it’s at heart a play interested in how toxic ideas about gender and human worth create conflict and suffering. Any attempt to explain its tragedy in more-than-human terms—for example, to see the storm that surrounds Duncan’s murder as indicative of a “natural” order violated by regicide—risks reiterating the damaging ideology that the play itself works to expose.

In my recent book, I argue instead that the tragic energy of Macbeth and a clutch of other plays from the period lies in their restless interrogation of a world whose shape and operations remain indecipherable. Precisely what bewilders varies from play to play: in some, it’s what happens after death; in others, it’s the source of human desires (including one’s own). But in certain plays, in particular Macbeth and John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, what remains beyond understanding is precisely how the more-than-human world relates to the human one.

In what respects, then, can seeing tragedy in these terms speak to our environmental crisis? In a more general sense, I think, there is value in attending to how tragedies written by Shakespeare and his contemporaries present characters in dialogue with the wider worlds through which they move. An unwillingness to appreciate this dimension of English Renaissance tragedy might, perhaps, be ascribed to a broader failure (at least in the West) to recognise human entanglement in the more-than-human world. Any response to our environmental crisis needs to begin with this recognition.

More specifically, though also perhaps more obliquely, reading tragedy in this way may be helpful because responding to the environmental crisis requires the jolt in conventional wisdom often experienced by tragic figures: it asks us to acknowledge (to paraphrase Hamlet) there that are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in the dominant philosophies of the present. Tragedy has the power to shatter our usual ideas of the world, and to replace these ideas with something more complex and expansive.

These plays do not hold out an optimistic message. But they do, I think, point to the problem: they show us how difficult it is to move beyond our usual horizons of thought, how much easier it is—to return again to Carney’s claim—to think about today than about “[t]omorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow”, to borrow Macbeth’s words.

Macbeth’s apocalyptic and nihilistic vision of the future is hardly a torch to guide us. But it might, perhaps, be considered a lightning strike illuminating the reorientation of perspective required of us.

_{Feature image by Marée-Breyer (Ivry, Val-de-Marne), Bibliothèque nationale de France via Wikimedia Commons. CC0 1.0}

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Orality, the book, and the computer: What happens to ‘literature’?

Coming into academia from the margins of Postcolonial Studies, when it was heroically striving to give an academic voice to indigenous cultures in the 1980-90s, I am aware that any celebration of the book is likely to be considered by some to be a subtle denigration of past traditions of oral composition and recording. What is worse, these days celebrating the book might also be resented by those who owe allegiance to futuristic forms of digital reading or what one can call visual orality—the use of mixed media, rooted in TV and film technologies, to tell stories and convey information. The book is in a terrible squeeze between those two positions. And yet, the book needs to be championed as the prime site of literature.

Before doing so, one also needs to face the fact that literature is not an idealist construct; it is not a form of immaculate conception in the human mind. It is shaped by the media of its recording. Literature in cultures of primary orality—if the word ‘literature’ can be used in that context, for its etymology denotes writing—was fashioned by the medium of breath which recorded it. For one, oral literature’s construction was often repetitive and contained many redundancies: you can find echoes of this even in written epics rooted in earlier oral cultures, such as Homer’s Odyssey, where the same god is heralded with the same description or phrase every time he or she appears in the narrative. Such repetition served various mnemonic purposes in a culture where the story had to be memorized, and there was no written text to consult. Moreover, the enunciation and preservation of oral narratives were mostly linked to their practical usage, either to record lineages, sacred stories, foundational myths, or to provide information about, say, foraging and shelter-building.

It is with the book—also in its earlier forms—that ‘literature’ slowly gets riven into ‘creative/artistic’ and vocational/professional/trade literatures. Whatever the drawbacks of such alienation, for ‘(creative) literature’ the book offers serious advantages. One can argue—despite the well-intended objections of many of my postcolonialist colleagues—that literature comes into being only with the rise of the book (including its early manuscript form). Here is a medium that, after breath and stone and other media, shapes what we now know as literature, because once words can be written down extensively, they can also be written down exclusively. The separation between literature and trade or vocational literature is easier to introduce, propagate, and sustain. This has drawbacks, but it also has serious advantages.

The book, contrary to what has often been claimed, is not just an elitist project; it is also a hugely democratic one. Historically, this can be illustrated with the example of India, where the earliest book manuscripts are associated with Buddhism and the non-Brahminical language of Pali, not with the Sanskrit treatises and epics of Brahminical Hinduism. Evidently, Buddhism—as a ‘religion’ with a middle caste following and without the institutional hegemonic privileges of Brahminism—used the written word extensively to connect across large spaces and periods.

The ancient Vedas, passed on orally from one consecrated Brahmin to another consecrated Brahmin, remained unchanged, and unrecorded in writing, until after the ‘bookish’ challenge of Buddhism and other such ‘sects.’ As Wendy Doniger notes, the Vedas, which were recorded orally (and, one can add, institutionally: through the Brahmin caste), were preserved in one iteration: “every syllable preserved for centuries, through a process of rigorous memorization.” Hence, there are no variants of the Vedas, in comparison to the later epics, such as the Mahabharata, which were recorded both orally and in writing, and so they exist in multiple versions. This brings forth the other democratic aspect of the book: its ability to escape capture and to survive as a minority position. For dissent to survive and be passed on in oral societies, it would require large areas of support. Individual dissent would exist, but it would never get recorded or passed on. The book, despite all kinds of inflicted burning, enables this.  After all, the book can be moved across space and time, which means that it can more easily survive spaces and times hostile to its contents. This physicality increases the possibilities of literature, delinking it from social utility.

Another aspect to how the book enabled literature to be literature is embedded not in the words written down in a book, but, so to say, in the spaces between the words. “When you speak, you automatically stop thinking; it’s like being released from a contract,” says the authorial narrator of César Aira’s Ghosts. Unlike oral recitations and speaking, the book actually enables thinking, including dissenting or deviant thinking. The kind of contemplation it demands and permits is unique.

Aristotle held contemplation as the highest human capacity, ranking it above activity, because it involves thinking about the cosmos, which far exceeds in beauty and complexity any work of human hands. From his perspective, actually reading a book—the work of human hands—would not be true contemplation. I do not follow this Aristotelian definition of contemplation. Instead, I think of it more in terms of “deep attention”, a phrase that the Korean-German philosopher, Byung-Chul Han uses interchangeably with it.

But, interestingly, when one reads literature, one reads not only the words, accessed within the purported transparency of all other disciplines, but also between the lines and between the words. Literature depends not just on words, but also on silences, contradictions, and noise to convey its meanings. One can use the image of the blank spaces that lie between words and paragraphs and chapters in a book to illustrate this: in literature these ‘blank spaces’ also count, and the book, as a medium, enables us to pay deep attention to these ‘blank spaces’ too. At its best, one can argue that the book enables us, despite the limitations of language, to contemplate what Aristotle considered the “eternal”—that which actually escapes language. Eternal is not the word I would use for it, given its many misusages since then, but I think it will suffice to convey my point here.

Will this “eternal” nature still be available when we move to futuristic media (digitized reading and visual orality)? In a series of fascinating books, Byung-Chul Han doubts this, pointing out that the “medium of thinking is quiet” and noting that deep attention is not compatible with multi-tasking and incessant pop-ups, among other things. The book obviously also offers a greater capacity to slow down and focus than current futuristic replacements, and both of these are essential for deep attention. Visual orality, with its tendency to define our imagination—something capitalized, literally, by all those super-hero and fantasia films and computer games today—also curtails the borders of contemplation. There will obviously be some advantages to this shift to digitized reading and visual orality, but they are unlikely to accrue to our writing and reading of literature. This will affect our capacity to contemplate and pay deep attention to everything outside and inside us.

The ‘literature’ that will come out of it, if the book is largely abandoned as the primary medium for literature, will be very different from what we have had for a few centuries now, just as the ‘literature’ of primary orality was markedly different. It will affect the way we ‘contemplate’ the cosmos and how we understand ourselves.

_{Featured image by Freepik}

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Five spooky story collections to keep you up this Halloween [reading list]

We all know Poe (though Eurovision fans might ask “Who the hell is Edgar?”). We’ve all heard of M.R. James and his wide range of ghost stories (watched The Haunting of Bly Manor yet?). We all love Lovecraft (unless you’re squeamish about tentacles).

But are we neglecting other authors just as capable of keeping us up at night? For centuries, writers have delved into the spooky and strange, the unusual and uncanny, the horrifying and heinous. Their stories deserved to be remembered too.

To celebrate the scariest day of the year, here’s five short story collections to widen your Halloween reading:

1. The Wendigo and Other Stories by Algernon Blackwood, edited by Aaron Worth

Take this as your sign to never go camping in the Canadian wilderness. Or canoeing in Europe. Or on a tropical holiday to Egypt. Best to just stay inside with a copy of Algernon Blackwood’s greatest horror stories, their locations taken from Blackwood’s varied, whirlwind life and distorted into nightmarish borderlands. Enter at your peril…

Read: The Wendigo and Other Stories

2. The Virgin of the Seven Daggers and Other Stories by Vernon Lee, edited by Aaron Worth

Ever heard the saying “the past always comes back to haunt you?” It rings very true in Vernon Lee’s, aka Violet Paget’s, frightening short stories. Whether a haunted portrait, a long-dead poet’s lock of hair, or even a ghostly opera singer’s voice, the past is a lurking presence in all of Lee’s words. And digging it up might prove her character’s dooms.

Read: The Virgin of the Seven Daggers and Other Stories

3. The Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories by Arthur Machen, edited by Aaron Worth

Before Lovecraft there was Machen, a Welsh writer inspired by the Pagan ruins and misty forests surrounding his hometown Caerleon. His stories explore the unknown and unknowable, including “The Great God Pan” and his wicked daughter Helen Vaughan, the twisted, supernatural cult of “The White People”, and the tales within a tale told by “The Three Imposters”.

Read: The Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories

4. Gothic Tales by Arthur Conan Doyle, edited by Darryl Jones

Yes, the creator of Sherlock Holmes also loved his horror! His “Gothic Tales” are some of the greatest put to paper. Try “The Case of Lady Sannox”, a story of deception and gory revenge. Or maybe “The Silver Mirror”, in which visions of a past murder haunt an innocent accountant. If you’re a fan of Conan Doyle’s mysteries, give his “Gothic Tales” a try this Halloween!

Read: Gothic Tales

5. Green Tea and Other Weird Stories by Sheridan Le Fanu, edited by Aaron Worth

With wonderful titles like “The Ghost and the Bonesetter” and “Wicked Captain Walshawe, of Wauling”, you know you’re in for a treat with this Irish author’s weird short tales. Don’t miss out on his most famous story, “Carmilla”, said to have inspired Bram Stoker when writing his own vampiric creation.

Read: Green Tea and Other Weird Stories

If you’ve enjoyed our recommendations, why not check out our full Halloween Reading List on Bookshop?

• Bookshop UK
• Bookshop US

_{Featured image by Mathew MacQuarrie on Unsplash.}

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A new queer world: how poetry remade gay life [long read]

In San Francisco and Boston after the Second World War, gay and lesbian poets came together to build a new queer literature and a new queer world. They came together both as activists and as poets. When activism failed, or visibility was denied, poetry provided a through line with a deeper and longer sense of queer history, real or imagined, from Whitman to Wilde, Sappho to Gertrude Stein. The underground status of early queer activism was matched by the DIY publishing ethos of the poetic avant-garde associated with the ‘New American Poetry’, an umbrella term for a diverse set of writers brought together in a famed anthology edited by gay San Francisco writer and editor Donald Allen. Passed from hand to hand, smuggled into bookstores or in private mailing networks, the semi-samizdat activity of little magazines, small press pamphlets, and beautiful letterpress editions matched the distribution models of early gay and lesbian publications like One and The Ladder.

It was a poet who published the first public coming out essay in modern American letters. Written by poet, anarchist, and esoteric scholar Robert Duncan,’ ‘The Homosexual in Society’ appeared in 1944 when he was in his mid-20s. The poem was more a universalist critique of upper-class white gay male identity than it was a simple affirmation, using sexuality to challenge the established order of capitalist society, and this radical strain was essential to the work of the poets among whose Duncan’s work was central. Duncan was part of the self-declared ‘Berkeley Renaissance’, a group of anarchists, bohemians, and activists in California. Duncan and fellow poets Robin Blaser and Jack Spicer rubbed shoulders with a young Philip K. Dick and anarchist theorist Paul Goodman, as they created their own vision of a queer poetry that would reinvent ideas of love, sexuality, and human society.

Over in Boston, these poets had links to the so-called ‘‘Occult School’’, another group of gay poets who ha’d emerged amongst the scenes of sex work, bohemia, and queer love on Beacon Hill, a neighbourhood under early threat of gentrifying destruction. Circulating among queer bars, on the fringes of academia, and in the radical collective education experiment of Black Mountain College, poets John Wieners, Stephen Jonas, Ed Marshall and Gerrit Lansing gathered around queerness, magick, Aleister Crowley, and jazz. They produced their own magazines, reading groups, and ‘magic evenings’, reading and living poetry in an atmosphere of underclass solidarity, in the face of the police and the mental health institutions that sanctioned medical torture such as electroshock therapy. As the ‘50s became the ‘60s and the great social movements for race, sexuality, and class grew, some died, some disappeared, some kept writing.

At Howard University, Judy Grahn participated in the Civil Rights movement and discovered lesbian feminism when her teacher, Nathan Hare, showed his students the lesbian magazine The Ladder as an example of comparative activism. Moving to the Bay Area, where Hare had helped set up the first Black Studies department in the country on the back of student activism, she and others were involved in solidarity actions for the Black Panthers and consciousness raising groups, out of which emerged Bay Area Women’s Gay Liberation.

As it had for the gay writers of the Berkeley Renaissance, poetry proved central to the emerging lesbian movement. Grahn’s ‘The Common Woman Poems’ were printed and bootlegged on fridges, tacked to walls, and handed out on the streets. In this era, it was poems as much as speeches, manifestos, or novels that provided the movement with its theory and its practice. The Women’s Press collective, and gay magazines like Gay Sunshine in San Francisco and Fag Rag in Boston published with an open, anarchist-leaning focus. Anticipating the abolitionist goals of today, in 1972 Fag Rag presented a radical list of demands to the Democratic National Convention including prison abolition, the disbanding of the military, and recognition of gender fluidity.

Poetry and poets were at the centre of community-building institutions, whether through small presses such as Kitchen Table Press, through public readings or private discussions. The African American socialist feminist group Combahee River Collective pioneered intersectional analyses, organising around serial murders of Black women in Boston, with the support of Audre Lorde, who came down from New York and wrote her great and moving poem ‘Need’ in support. Lorde’s ‘sister love’ Pat Parker spoke out firmly in San Francisco. Good Gay Poets, the small press associated with Fag Rag, published the first book by an out gay Black male poet in the States, Adrian Stanford’s criminally ignored Black and Queer, alongside work by Combahee associate Stephania Byrd and Native American poet-activist Maurice Kenny. 

As with the Civil Rights Movement from which it emerged, as queer institutions achieved mainstream success and legal gains, the emergence of a middle-class and of those in positions of power too often overlooked those from whom the movement had grown: the grass roots, the underclass, the poets, the junkies, the homeless. Poetry was a place for them to have a voice, against respectability politics and against selling out. In Boston, Fag Ragger Charlie Shively symbolically burned his bible, his Harvard degree, and his insurance card at a protest against the homophobia of the church and state. In San Francisco, the White Night Riots broke out after the murder of Harvey Milk, providing a symbol of resistance as the cultural backlash against a decade of gains from feminism, Black Power, and gay liberation, set in under the new cowboy president Ronald Reagan. Poets were at the centre of coalition-building efforts such as the Left Write conference in San Francisco, which brought together writers from diverse communities to challenge the rise of the far right.

In the midst of all this, the community was hit by a fresh crisis. At first little known or understood, the spread of HIV-AIDs gave weight to the Reaganite backlash and exposed the sharp divisions of healthcare provision that marginalized communities have always suffered. As AIDS became inescapable, poetry reflected the crisis, giving vent to what Douglas Crimp famously described as the twinned goals of “mourning and militancy”. Poetry (as well as song) testimonies became a central way for the community to gather and reflect at the all-too-frequent funerals and memorial ceremonies. In a recent book, poet Pamela Sneed describes her role as what she calls a “funeral diva” seeking to remember the dead and to inspire, exhort, and comfort the living. Bruce Boone, one of the co-founders of the San Francisco queer writing tendency known as ‘New Narrative’, worked as a carer at the Zen AIDS center run by Zen master and former drag queen Issan Dorsey.

As the joyous momentum of the gay liberation era was lost, others sought to retain the transgressive edge of early activism. Another New Narrative writer, Robert Glück was involved in the first act of civil disobedience against the government’s handling of AIDS. This action emerged from the Affinity Group movement of non-violent civil disobedience against the arms industry and the military industrial complex. Blockading the road near the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a nuclear weapons research lab, the Enola Gay Faggot Affinity Group—punningly named for the plane that dropped the A-bomb on Japan—staged a ‘Blood and Money‘ ritual, pouring blood on the road and chanting “money for AIDS, not war”. New Narrative writers wrote some of the great books of the AIDS era: Dodie Bellamy uses the metaphor of the vampire alongside cut-ups and snapshots of bohemian life in San Francisco in her Letters of Mina Harker; Kevin Killian’s Argento Series stages the pandemic through the giallo movies of Dario Argento; Glück’s own recent About Ed memorializes his former partner, the artist Ed Aulerich-Sugai, ending with an astonishing fifty-page sequence constructed from years’’ worth of Ed’s dream journals.

It’s easy to say that, now AIDS is relatively under control for white middle-class gay men, we have entered a new era. But, while these gains are very real, they are unevenly distributed. Today the victims of AIDS are overwhelmingly the poor and people of colour in the States, and across the African continent. The Military Industrial Complex continues apace, in bloody wars and the provision of arms for dictatorships and corrupt governments worldwide, as the Cold War positions of the past fifty years reassert themselves in new form. The poets of the past, and their inheritors today, refuse to be misled by superficial gains, producing writing that continues to remind us of the costs and inequalities of gay liberation. We live in a world of staggering inequality, an inequality revealed by the uneven handling of the Covid pandemic, and by the concentration of the majority of the world’s wealth in an ever-smaller percentile of the world’s population. The queer- and trans-phobic backlash in the United States continues apace as books are banned and the battleground shifts from the discourse of sexuality to that of gender, a replay of the old culture wars fought in the Reagan Era. Meanwhile, cities so central to gay liberation literature like Boston and San Francisco, have been transformed almost beyond recognition, with the surging wealth of big tech—and its ties to the Trumpian right—occurring just a few kilometers away from the worsening effects of the opioid crisis.

As gentrification continues to alter the communities and neighborhoods from which activism emerged almost beyond recognition, the poetry of the Berkeley Renaissance, the Occult School of Boston, Fag Rag, the Combahee River Collective, New Narrative and so many more accesses a different timeline, a different way of looking at history, a different embodiment of what it means to exist and to fight for another world. This poetry is no historical relic but a guide for how to survive and a spur for how to fight in the present.

_{Featured image by Roger W. via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.}

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Before Northanger Abbey: Jane Austen and “Susan”

With hindsight, it’s hard to imagine a more spectacular publishing flub than the rejection of Pride and Prejudice in its first version (working title “First Impressions”) in 1797. True, Jane Austen was at that point a complete unknown, and it was ambitious of her father George to offer the manuscript to Thomas Cadell of The Strand, proprietor of one of the fanciest firms in the business. “First Impressions” may have been quite unlike the published text of 1813 (for one thing, it was probably about 20% longer), and of course Pride and Prejudice was not to attain bestseller status until decades later. Even so, Cadell now looks to have been a little hasty. “Declined by return of post,” he scrawled on George Austen’s letter, though at least he took the trouble to archive it. An Austen relative bought the letter back in 1840.

A more complex and mysterious story surrounds Northanger Abbey (“Susan” in its original form), though interesting new evidence continues to emerge. This novel didn’t appear in print until after Austen’s death in 1817, prefaced by a terse notice in which she describes selling the book years earlier, in 1803, to a publisher who advertised it as forthcoming but went no further. “That any bookseller should think it worthwhile to purchase what he did not think it worthwhile to publish seems extraordinary,” Austen writes with a flourish of acerbic Johnsonese. The paradoxical result—for a work satirizing the vagaries of fashion in everything from Gothic spine-chillers (“Oh! the dreadful black veil!”) to must-have fabrics (“coquelicot ribbons instead of green”)—is that the world represented in Northanger Abbey was already a thing of the past. Explanatory notes are useful for twenty-first century readers but they may even have been useful then.

We learn more from Austen’s surviving letters. The publisher in question was the mid-market London firm of Crosby & Co., whose proprietor, Benjamin Crosby, had published William Godwin’s radical novel Caleb Williams in the 1790s, and was now expanding his fiction list to become the fourth most prolific publisher of novels between 1800 and 1809. Crosby paid £10, as much as a debut author could expect, but this was small potatoes alongside the handsome numbers commanded by big names like Ann Radcliffe (£800 for The Italian in 1797) or Maria Edgeworth (a prodigious £2,100 for Patronage in 1813). Then, as Austen says, he went ahead and advertised “Susan”.

But how seriously—how hard—was Crosby trying? A first advertisement was discovered by the great Austen scholar R.W. Chapman, who in his Clarendon Press edition of 1923 reported, from an obscure 1803 miscellany, a listing of “Susan” as forthcoming alongside several other “New and Useful Books Published by B. Crosby & Co.” That was the sum of knowledge until a Review of English Studies article of 2006, in which Anthony Mandal turned up the first known newspaper ad, in the Dorchester and Sherborne Journal, again listing “Susan” as “In the Press.” A third ad was reported by Margie Burns in the journal Persuasions in 2017: enough to confirm Austen’s belief that Crosby had indeed advertised the work, but all told, there is precious little to show for a century of trying. But then comes a beautiful instance of the way searchable full-text databases can now transform research, eclipsing decades of archival eyestrain with a few well-aimed keystrokes. The tally of known ads for “Susan” now stands at ten, seven of them, all from newspapers, first reported by Burns in a 2021 book. Again, these are all omnibus ads mentioning the forthcoming “Susan” alongside other Crosby wares such as The Mysterious Count, The Dangers of Credulity, and The Three Monks!!!, all of which appeared in 1803. Taken together, they show beyond question that for several months, Crosby genuinely intended to publish “Susan,” and was keen to promote the novel nationwide, beyond his core metropolitan market. One ad was in Austen’s local Hampshire Chronicle; others came out in Derby, Hull, Northampton, and Stamford, as well as in London. Newspaper survival rates are very low; there were no doubt further ads.

What made Crosby change his mind? Several theories have been floated, some of them based on the idea (plausible in itself) that it took Crosby several months to realise what a feisty, barbed satire he had on his hands. For the pioneering feminist Rebecca West in 1932, Northanger Abbey was a work that put “the institutions of society regarding women through the most gruelling criticism they have ever received,” and the last thing Crosby wanted to do was upset the respectable types who bought his books. Then there’s the widely touted theory that, with Gothic fiction prominent in his list, he couldn’t afford to publish a satire ridiculing Gothic fiction.

Over the years, however, Crosby was willing enough to publish oppositional fiction (witness Caleb Williams, a novel so politically charged that its author feared arrest), and he was no less willing to publish spoofs of the Gothic: witness The Three Monks!!!, an arch, mildly risqué tale about absent crusaders, randy friars, and bored ladies who “were always disposed to receive extremely well, the godly men who came to amuse them.” The most persuasive explanation is that of Mandal, who points to Crosby’s escalating business woes at the time of the “Susan” ads. The likelihood is that Austen was just the victim of unlucky timing as Crosby became risk-averse and retrenched for a year or two. His troubles soon eased, but by then, in the fast-moving world of literary fashion, he was looking for new acquisitions; “Susan” was already ancient history.

Austen seems to have waited and waited, but her patience snapped in 1809, the year newspaper ads for another novel titled “Susan” began to appear. Determined by now to retrieve her manuscript and publishing rights, she wrote to Crosby & Co. under the pseudonym Mrs Ashton Dennis, thereby teeing up an eloquent sign-off: “I am Gentlemen &c &c | MAD.” All she received in reply was an unpleasant letter from Crosby’s son, offering to sell back the manuscript but also threatening legal action should she publish elsewhere without paying. In the end, Austen was not to recover the manuscript until 1816, when she set about revising it (renaming her heroine in the process) while more or less simultaneously drafting Persuasion. The novels were posthumously published together as a four-volume set, marked, fortuitously or not, by an almost palindromic structure. Departing from Austen’s trademark rural setting (“such pictures of domestic Life in Country Villages as I deal in”), the framing volumes—the first of Northanger Abbey, the second of Persuasion—turn their satirical gaze instead on shark-infested Bath. With the unfinished Sanditon, they herald the more urban novelist that Austen might have become had she lived.

So, what about the other Susan, the one that made it into print in 1809, concerning a heroine confined on a Hebridean island for part of the action? Austen almost certainly saw the novel advertised (it was, the ads declared, distinguished by its “unity of interest and elegant simplicity”) and she may even have read it. If so, the simplicity would have struck her more than the interest. There were of course plenty of the usual novelistic incidents, as the Monthly Review wearily acknowledged: “a prodigious number of fevers, together with several faintings, two duels, and one or two deaths.” It just didn’t quite seem worth keeping count.

_{Featured Image: ‘Northanger Persuasion Title Page’ by Jane Austen, Lilly Library, Indiana University via Wikimedia Commons. [Public Domain]}

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Warsaw Tales: An interview with Olga Tokarczuk

Ever since I first read “Che Guevara” in Olga Tokarczuk’s short story collection Playing Many Drums (2001), I have wanted to translate it. So, when I was asked to compile Warsaw Tales, it was one of the first stories to come to mind—an ideal contribution. The story mentions several easily identifiable places within the city and is set in December 1981, at a specific historical moment when the eyes of the world were on Poland. This was when the comparative freedom of the year in which the free trade union “Solidarity” seemed to have won some political concessions in Poland—and strikes were continuing in an effort to gain more liberty—was abruptly quashed by the imposition of martial law, tanks in the streets, internment, and a dismal period of oppression.

I have always wondered how autobiographical “Che Guevara” is. I knew Olga had studied psychology in Warsaw and originally thought of becoming a psychotherapist, but I’ve heard her jokingly say that when she realized her own mentality was even odder than that of her patients, she decided to be a writer instead! And I was curious about her choice of setting a story in Warsaw, when I know it’s not her favourite place, and she has only ever lived there as a student. So, I was thrilled to be able to ask Olga some questions about it.

ALJ: How much does “Che Guevara” echo your own experience as a student of clinical psychology in Warsaw during the student strikes of 1981? It feels extremely real, as if you lived it to the word, right down to the freezing cold and reading Cortazar.

OT: The whole story is based on my own genuine experience. I didn’t have to exercise my imagination very hard to write it. Nowadays that period in my life seems to me one of the toughest and most futile. It was a time of crisis in Poland, when everything was in deficit, and then the state of martial law that followed the so-called “Summer of Solidarity” crushed all our hopes of change. I also think of the martial law period as a time of collective depression.

In those days I was working as a volunteer at a community psychiatric care centre in the Warsaw district where I was studying clinical psychology. I looked after several patients, including a man whom I called “Che Guevara” in the story, though in reality he had a completely different nickname. I changed it because he was a recognizable figure in the streets of Warsaw and I wanted to make him more anonymous, though I didn’t really succeed.

ALJ: The patients: Che Guevara, Anna, and Igor are each suffering from a condition that isolates them but seems to give them a strange insight that the “healthy” people around them don’t have. Are they based on actual patients, or are they purely metaphors to highlight the strangeness of the reality that the whole country was living through?

OT: I’ve always been curious about other ways of looking at things we regard as obvious, shared experiences. At the time, I was intensely involved with my studies, with clinical cases and actual patients. Almost every day I was busy at the psychiatric hospital, so even my perspective of the political events was rather out of line. Mental illness is a sort of strange mirror that reflects the real world in other dimensions, which are not always realistic. From these different perspectives we can see other truths, other dependencies. I didn’t create these characters to be metaphors, but rather possibilities for alternative worlds that are there, just under our noses. Reality seems to contain other, lesser realities within itself: it’s built like a cluster, budding with possibilities in the same way that mental illness is a different way of perceiving reality.

ALJ: The story was published in 2001 but perhaps written earlier. How does it fit into your work? Would you write it differently now? Has it ever come back to your mind?

OT: As this story is based on my own personal experience and did not require any effort of the imagination, I don’t think it could be written any differently. I sometimes go back to it when I arrive in Warsaw and recognize the places I moved about in then—frozen to the marrow, undernourished, and depressed. This story has become a part of my personal life.

ALJ: As a non-Varsovian, who went to university in the city but apart from that hasn’t lived there, what is your feeling about Warsaw? I know you’re a great fan of Bolesław Prus’s The Doll (set in Warsaw), and a great film-goer—what Warsaw-based literature or cinema would you recommend?

OT: I don’t like Warsaw, maybe because of those unpleasant memories from the martial law period, when I happened to be a student. I come from Lower Silesia, and Warsaw is rather an alien country for me. It’s a throbbing, rushing, wealthy city, full of competitiveness and stress, a business and trade centre, the Hongkong of central Europe. Everything that’s important and significant in Poland happens there—in terms of politics, the arts, business, and so on. But it’s not for me.

I’m very fond of the post-war films about Warsaw, about the reconstruction of the capital, because it was thoroughly destroyed, and I think its rebuilding is a sort of miracle, and the whole resurrected city should be a UNESCO world heritage site.

One could write a whole thesis on the cinematography of Warsaw. In the first place I would recommend Roman Polański’s film The Pianist and also Warsaw 44, directed by Jan Komasa, to understand the history of the city. The prewar history of Warsaw is excellently portrayed by the TV series The King of Warsaw, based on the book by Szczepan Twardoch. I also recommend Mr T.,Reverse, Day of the Wacko, the thriller serial Blinded by the Lights, and all the films of Stanisław Bareja, who had an incredible sense of humour.

– Olga Tokarczuk is a Nobel Prize winning Polish writer, her short story “Che Guevara” can be found in the new collection of translated short stories, Warsaw Tales.

_{Featured image by Suicasmo via Wikimedia Commons [CC BY-SA 4.0]}

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A listener’s guide to James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” [playlist]

Discover the musical veins of James Baldwin’s 1957 short story “Sonny’s Blues” as we mark the 100th anniversary of the writer and civil rights activist’s birth.

Tom Jenks reflects on some of these key musical works.

1) “Am I Blue?”

Near the end of the story, Sonny and his bandmates perform at a village nightclub. The band finishes its first set to scattered applause, and without warning the bass player begins almost sardonically playing “Am I Blue?” But why sardonically? Billie Holiday, in her 1941 performance with the Eddie Heywood Orchestra, gives a lush, touching, and romantic upbeat lift to the song’s undertow of abandonment, sorrow, and loneliness. An earlier version by Ethel Waters has a somewhat more sentimental seriocomic tone. In a film version, Waters appeared surrounded by a troupe of smiling cotton pickers with cutaway shots of a white society couple in top hat and gown looking gaily down on the scene made for their entertainment. The bass player’s sardonic touch seems to say, Enough of suffering. Listen to what we can do instead with jazz.

2) “Body and Soul”

Louis Armstrong and this jazz standard harken back to swing-based music, which a teenage Sonny calls “old-time, down home crap.” Sonny’s distaste for Armstrong can be read as a younger artist’s natural need for self-assertion and transcendence of found forms. When Sonny’s older brother testily asks who Sonny admires then, the answer is Bird—Charlie Parker—and the shift in the story from Armstrong’s music to Parker’s signals an often-painful generational struggle for freedom beyond old conventions, styles, modes, expressions, and understandings. The thread of “Sonny’s Blues” follows the fate of estranged brothers within a larger context of races divided from one another; it embodies the truth that no one of any race can be free of the effects of generations of racial oppression so long as it continues.

3) “All the Things You Are”

Charlie Parker’s discovery that the semitones of the chromatic scale can lead to any key opened greater possibilities for improvisation and carried jazz beyond Dixieland and swing into an era of modal melodies as performed by musicians such as Miles Davis and John Coltrane. In idolizing Charlie Parker, Baldwin’s Sonny is not only attracted to the music but also to drugs. Sonny would have known that Parker, as a teenager already on the rise in the jazz world, was using heroin. What Sonny couldn’t have known was that Parker would die at the age of thirty-four, the erosion from drugs and alcohol overpowering his sublime gifts, and that he himself would come to understand the personal cost of addiction.

4) “If I Could Hear My Mother Pray Again”

One of several spiritual songs in “Sonny’s Blues,” this gospel lament celebrates a mother’s Christian virtues and her grown child’s desire for return to childhood faith. When the brothers’ mother, whose faith is deep, counsels the older brother to always be there for Sonny, she’s thinking of her sons’ mortal and immortal fate. Without a redeeming connection in this life, could there be one in the next? “But what a terrible song,” Sonny comments and laughs. His laughter sounds softer, milder, more mature than his angry teenage dismissal of Armstrong was, yet strikes further notes in a generational musical progression from spirituals to blues to jazz. Music, myth, and man are advancing together.

5) “Is That the Old Ship of Zion”

In “Sonny’s Blues,” street revivalists sing this late nineteenth-century hymn derived from earlier spiritual and gospel lyrics. The song promises that the ship will carry its voyagers over the difficult waters to a brighter destination—many a thousand will be rescued. The older brother comments that not a soul hearing this song on the street in Harlem has been rescued. The cloth of the story is woven from biblical allusion, cadence, church music, and imagery, but Baldwin poses all this in such a way that the reader can decide according to his or her own beliefs about salvation. Baldwin doesn’t insist, but his view is humanist. His concern is with the here and now. He seeks to encourage everyone’s participation and kinship in improving the quality of all lives on Earth.

 6) “A Love Supreme”

To get a fully embodied sense of the musical progression embodied in “Sonny’s Blues,” a reader can listen to Billie Holiday’s “Am I Blue?” and then listen to John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme,” the movement from one song to the other representing a shift from sorrowing to triumph and restoration, which is what James Baldwin’s short story is about. Coltrane’s song offers thanks for his recovery from heroin addiction, while Baldwin’s story poses two brothers’ estrangement over addiction and their ultimate rapprochement as an analogy to racial division and an inspiration toward unity and love.

_{Featured image by pinelife via Flickr. CC BY 2.0.}

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20 HBCU graduates that have shaped America [slideshow]

Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) are dedicated to empowering students and alumni with the tools to drive significant civic and cultural change. Through their intentional focus on leadership, advocacy, and excellence, HBCU graduates have made remarkable strides in political, legal, cultural, and artistic fields. These institutions foster an environment where students thrive and emerge as trailblazers. By nurturing talent and commitment, HBCUs continue to shape leaders who make profound contributions to American democracy. Click through the slideshow below to learn about twenty inspirational graduates.

_{Featured image created using Canva by Sarah Butcher, Marketer at OUP.}

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Love your friend as yourself

Perhaps the most popular command in the Bible is to “love your friend”—or “neighbor,” as it’s commonly translated— “as yourself” (Lev 19:18). Less popular today are the preceding verses, which command friends to rebuke each other if one has sinned. In ancient Judaism, a good rebuke was a mark of friendship, although it had to be done the right way.

In the book of Leviticus, the commands to love and rebuke your friend are given in the context of the justice system. A loving friend will rebuke the sinning party in a lawsuit. In the biblical legal system, cases were sometimes judged by friends, village elders, and witnesses who saw neighbors in need of resolution (Gen 31:36–37; Job 29:7–16). The crucial responsibility of such a judge, according to Leviticus, is to remain impartial, a stipulation emphasized by repetition and Hebrew wordplay. Showing favoritism toward the powerful, or even the weak, is not an act of love.

Over time, the imperative to rebuke a friend became associated with wisdom, and it is frequently found in texts like Proverbs (Prov 9:7–8; 10:17; 19:25; 25:9–12; 27:5; 28:23). According to these texts, a loving friend tells someone when they’ve erred, so they can get their life back on track.

While the biblical book of Job is often considered wisdom literature, it frequently subverts genre expectations. Job is righteous, and yet his sacrifices fail to protect his children. In other books, if someone makes a sacrifice that is rejected, or if their children suddenly die, it is usually because of sin (1 Sam 13:8–14; Prov 11:21).

Three “friends” visit to comfort Job after the death of his children, and they try to be the best friends they can be by rebuking him for whatever sin he committed. He’ll be restored once he repents—or so they think. In this case, however, the expectations are flipped. Job’s suffering is not punishment for sin. Instead of a mark of friendship, the friends’ rebuke comes across like self-righteous presumption toward a friend in need.

Job recognizes that his friends are following wisdom protocols, but he raises the stakes and holds them to legal protocols. Job talks about his situation as one who is embroiled in legal troubles. His accuser, as he sees it, is God, who applied punishment too swiftly and with a heavy hand. He says the friends neglect the legal definition of a proper rebuke according to Leviticus 19:

Job accuses his friends of showing favoritism toward the most powerful disputant—God! If they are truly friends, they will remain impartial when they judge his case. Job wants to prove his innocence in court—but he wants an unbiased judge who is willing to say, “God, you are wrong! Job, you are right!” Job imagines a true friend who would rise up and bring justice to his trial (9:32–33; 16:19–21; 19:25; 31:35).

An imaginary friend is a way of loving yourself as a friend, especially when your friends don’t love you as themselves. Job is not the only character who relies on imaginary friends.

Lewis Carroll’s classic tale, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), shares affinities with the book of Job. Like Job, Alice’s story is told within a frame tale that opens on an ordinary day when suddenly nothing works the way it should. Like Job’s friends, the citizens of Wonderland become increasingly antagonistic, engaging Alice in a series of debates about logic, meaning, existence, and morality. Children’s literature of the time preached heavy-handed morals, but Wonderland subverts genre expectations and makes the self-righteous characters look silly.

The Cheshire Cat is an ephemeral character who appears and disappears suddenly between Alice’s arguments. The Cat is technically an imaginary character—in fact, everyone in Wonderland is part of Alice’s dream. The enigmatic Cat does not overtly take Alice’s side or help her win debates, but it is the only Wonderlandian that Alice calls a “friend.”

What sets the Cat apart is its objectivity. While other characters insist that there is logic in the chaos, the Cat readily admits, “We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.” This genuine acknowledgement of reality seems to be where Alice finds friendship, and it is the kind of authenticity that Job sought from his friends.

“Love your friend as yourself.” It seems like an easy rule. But it means we must acknowledge when the world doesn’t make sense and there’s nothing we can do about it. Sometimes being a friend means going against the grain—providing objective judgement even when the world’s rules point in the opposite direction.

_{Featured image: ‘Job and his Friends’ by Ilya Repin via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.}

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Seduction French-style—why read Colette?

If I met you at a party and we started chatting and telling each other about our favourite authors, and I mentioned Colette, you might look blank. “Who?” I might ask you if you’d seen the recent 2018 Hollywood film about Colette’s youthful marriage to an older man, a roguish entrepreneur and hack journalist who got his teenager wife writing—a series of saucy, racy stories about the goings-on in a girls’ school in the provinces—and then published the pieces under his own name. I might ask you if you’d seen the earlier 1958 film Gigi, based on one of Colette’s most famous (infamous) novels, concerning a young woman being groomed for high-end prostitution by her courtesan aunts, and featuring Maurice Chevalier throatily groaning “Thank Heaven for Little Girls”… You might have an image of Colette’s work as being all fin-de-siècle frou-frou naughtiness, rather dated surely: a mix of can-can, cream cakes, and kittens. Colette was terribly keen on her pets, as her second husband once grumpily observed.

The Colette whose books I’ve been re-reading certainly wrote fascinatingly about animals. Her appetite for writing about her pleasure in their company links to her appetite for writing about other sorts of pleasure; all aspects of sensuality. She explored the lure of food, love, sex, erotic adventures, taboo experiences, war, violence…the list goes on. She wrote exactly and unsentimentally about women’s secret lives and thoughts, about male codes and vulnerabilities, and about the power play between the sexes. She wrote about homosexual love and had lesbian love affairs herself. Her relationship with the woman everyone called Missy was tender and serious and got her back on her feet after depression and illness. She took a scalpel to the misogyny of the early twentieth century in France, exposing the contradictions of a culture that glorified exaggerated femininity while denying women the vote, controlling their social power and minimising their capacity to earn decent livings. She didn’t live above this culture but plunged into it. She lived out her own conflicts. She wasn’t a feminist but had beloved female friends. She wrote adoringly about her mother but neglected her own daughter. She examined perversion in her novels but in life sometimes got stuck in the victim position.

In Colette’s day, men were named as masters, wielding phallic pens, and women as silent muses perched on pedestals. Colette broke free of this trap and got down to work. If she learned writerly discipline from her first husband, she certainly went on perfecting it once she had left him. She became a prolific author who published over seventy books. She earned her living all her life. When necessary, she also worked in the theatre as a mime, notably performing posh stripteases on the music-hall stage; she toured dramatic versions of her novels, playing the starring roles; she worked as a journalist for Le Monde, reporting on the First World War; she even (briefly) opened and ran a beauty salon. She went on writing until she died: novels, short stories, plays, film scripts, newspaper and magazine articles—plus hundreds of letters to her gang of dear friends. Her work was widely popular. Her novels were bestsellers. The literary world caught up with her eventually. At her death she was given a state funeral.

For me Colette remains exhilaratingly modern even though she died halfway through the twentieth century. Partly that’s because she invented new forms for her books that express the originality of her subject matter. For example, we may think that we invented autofiction in the twenty-first century, but Colette got there a hundred years ago. She put herself into her fictions, teasing us: do you imagine this is my self-portrait? No: it’s just a model. So, in Birth of Day (La Naissance du Jour) we encounter a Madame Colette dallying with a man thirty years younger than she is. Mixed into the pleasure of their encounters are the pleasures of swimming in an amethyst sea (St Tropez), lowering bottles of amber wine into the well to cool for lunch, planting tangerine trees and mulching them with seaweed, and waking early to watch the dawn come up and the dew glitter on the tamarisk trees. The novel is certainly an enchanting, dreamy evocation of heat, desire, and sensual joy, but what makes it so startling is the way Colette constantly turns aside from the plot to insert memories of her mother Sido into the narrative. Sido is dead, yet simultaneously vibrantly alive, a beloved figure who interrupts the story to tease and admonish her daughter. Colette quotes Sido’s letters, listens to her voice. Sido is just as important as the beautiful young man lolling in Colette’s bedroom wanting sex. Sido seems a mother goddess, walking with her daughter in the radiant garden; with her, paradise is re-found and can be re-lived in the present. 

Paradise is a key word in thinking about Colette’s writing. Another reason I find Colette’s work so original and so modern is the way that it takes that Christian trope of the fallen world—paradise lost and paradise redeemed and paradise awaiting us in heaven—and resists and re-works it. Colette re-combines the body and spirit cut apart by Christian theology. She writes as a pagan, celebrating the natural world and giving us a place within it not as lords of creation but as ensouled animals connected to all that there is. She shows us a shimmering vision of paradise existing now, in this life, on this planet—a paradise we may, as humans, have damaged and exploited, and must now learn to love and to repair. If the body of the mother is paradise (paradise remembered, re-imagined, escaped from, yearned for, wounded, mended), then we can map that image onto the world around us and learn to care for it. Flesh is sacred. Dirt is holy. Desire is to be trusted, also examined. Colette never preaches. She seduces. I’m very happy to be seduced by her.

_{Featured image via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.}

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Racism, jazz, and James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”

Reading is good; rereading is better. I can’t say with certainty how many times—forty? fifty?—I’ve read James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” only that for more than thirty-five years I’ve been reading and teaching the story, each time with an undiminished sense of awe and appreciation for how Baldwin issues a prophetic warning about the outcome of racism while making deeply felt gestures of hope and reconciliation.

As the title indicates, the story moves on its music, specifically jazz. Whenever I read “Sonny’s Blues,” I think of John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme,” a long, prayerful piece that gives thanks for his recovery from heroin addiction and that percussively, sonorously refrains its title in praise of the Creator. Coltrane’s song dates from 1963, a few years after “Sonny’s Blues,” and both pieces take part in a shift occurring in race consciousness and the American psyche. “A Love Supreme” proceeds in four parts—a similar orchestration to “Sonny’s Blues,” which occurs in three acts with a denouement and begins with a song of denial:

I read about it in the paper, in the subway, on my way to work. I read it, and I couldn’t believe it, and I read it again. Then perhaps I just stared at it, at the newsprint spelling out his name, spelling out the story. . . .

It was not to be believed and I kept telling myself that . . .

The occasion of “Sonny’s Blues” is that a long-standing denial of a horribly painful truth has come home to the main character and can no longer be denied, though he tries. Having established this conflict, Baldwin promptly reveals the news: the narrator’s younger brother, Sonny, a jazz pianist, has been arrested for using and peddling heroin. From that moment, the story proceeds with forthcoming directness. What’s at stake is life and death.

In the 1950s the New York City rate of death from heroin use for Black users was as much as two times higher than for white users, and the median age of those who died was twenty-seven. Baldwin would have been all too aware of mortality even in youth, as in the course of his lifetime, he survived several suicide attempts. In an essay titled “The Uses of the Blues,” he writes:

I’m talking about what happens to you if, having barely escaped suicide, or death, or madness, or yourself, you watch your children growing up and no matter what you do, no matter what you do, you are powerless, you are really powerless, against the force of the world that is out to tell your child that he has no right to be alive. And no amount of liberal jargon, and no amount of talk about how well and how far we have progressed, does anything to soften or to point out any solution to this dilemma. In every generation, ever since Negroes have been here, every Negro mother and father has had to face that child and try to create in that child some way of surviving this particular world, some way to make the child who will be despised not despise himself.

In the early 1980s, when Toni Morrison was winding up sixteen years at Random House as a groundbreaking editor of Black authors, I was dismayed to hear various publishing personnel repeat the conventional wisdom of that era: Black people don’t buy books. It also meant that publishers were reluctant to spend money to support and publish work by Black writers, making it hard for those writers to find an audience. And going back to 1957 and Baldwin’s advent, how much more prevalent this conventional notion would have been and how very aware of it Baldwin would have been, taking into account the need to form his work in such a way as to summon an audience by touching readers of all kinds.

Wynton Marsalis has been credited with seeing jazz as a solution to a shared cultural mythology between Blacks and whites that can help move the needle on race relations. Baldwin employs this kind of perception in writing “Sonny’s Blues.” Throughout the story, readers aren’t necessarily aware of hearing jazz or blues in the scraps of sound that will ultimately crescendo in a transcendent performance at a Village nightclub, but that’s where the story will finish. Near the end, Baldwin’s narrator notes that not many people ever really hear the music they listen to:

And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations.

And it can also be said that not many people actually see what they’re looking at. Look, Baldwin was saying, this is how things are, and he wrote with the knowledge that change would be hard and slow to achieve. Across the sixty-five years since the story’s first publication, it has been assigned and taught in secondary schools and in colleges and universities throughout the world, ultimately reaching and moving many millions of readers to new awareness. Some things have changed for the better; some things have worsened; there’s still work to do.

When teaching “Sonny’s Blues,” I sometimes manage to get all the way through the lecture without letting my voice break or my tears well, though never without some students’ tears. But what are these tears? Grief, of course, at the terrible suffering. Wonder at the endurance required for survival and self-respect. Sorrow and joy mingled when the vulnerable heart’s truth is called forth, touched and held without sentimentality. Gratitude for Baldwin’s art.

_{Featured Image ‘James Baldwin on the Albert Memorial with statue of Shakespeare’ by Allan Warren via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)}

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